Thank you, Deputy Presiding Officer. May I thank the Cabinet Secretary and other Members for their excellent contributions this afternoon to this very mature debate on a report that is a very thorough one?

Now, I’d like to reiterate the importance of recruitment and retention as key issues in the future of the health service, because we need to teach and train sufficient numbers in the first instance and also we have to keep them in the system. There is a challenge, as Hefin David suggested. I’m the first doctor in my family and it was a significant challenge for someone like me, out in a rural area, to go to medical school in the first instance. We need to make it much easier for people, wherever you come from, to go to medical school.

May I thank Angela and Rhun and Julie for their contributions, as well as, of course, Caroline, Jeremy and Sian Gwenllian with regard to Bangor medical school, and also Hefin David? One matter, as there was a lot of emphasis on GPs and vacancies and the pressure on family medicine, one issue that I didn’t mention initially was the importance—. Even if we teach every GP that graduates from the medical schools that we have at present, we’re not training sufficient numbers at present even if we could retain every one of them in the system. We’re not training enough of them at present. We need to increase the number that we’re training and that’s why we’re calling for a medical school in Bangor.

The other point to make is that after training, once graduated, it’s important to retain doctors in the health service wherever they are. That is at the heart of the matter, that it is our young doctors who graduated two or three years ago who are working in our hospitals, who are the junior doctors, who are the future GPs, who are the specialists of the future, and at present they feel under significant pressure. That’s down to the way that they’re treated, very often, by managers within the health service, because these young medics have to fight for time off away from their jobs to study, to research; they have to battle to sit exams and battle for vacations, even, with constant pressure to fill vacancies in the rota, the on-call rota, and those posts are very busy already. We’ve heard about the pressure from Caroline Jones and others.

As well as that workload and the way that they’re treated—having to battle for everything—there’s also a duty to tell the truth when things go wrong, but when doctors complain to their managers about deficiencies in the service, when things happen that shouldn’t happen—becoming a whistleblower, that is—then those doctors are also in danger of being prosecuted themselves. Now, that is unacceptable. It undermines the morale of doctors who are totally committed, and when facing such pressure and such a lack of support from their managers, it’s little wonder that young doctors are leaving to work in other places, and they don’t get the opportunity to become local GPs or specialists, locally; they’ve left because of the way that they’re treated.

So, we need to increase the number of doctors that we’re training and we need to retain them, and that’s the major challenge facing us. A lack of doctors and nurses brings great pressure on the remaining staff, as we’ve already heard. And, yes, we do need to train more doctors. We’re not training enough here in Wales at present to meet the need. Even, as I said, if we could retain every single one of them that we’re training, we’re not training enough. And, yes, we do need another medical school in Bangor. We were having these debates 20 years ago when we were part of the process of establishing a new medical school in Swansea. One of the first steps that this Assembly took was to agree to that idea that one medical school for Wales wasn’t nearly enough, and I remember those early debates and the early steps taken to establish that medical school in Swansea, and we’re repeating history again, here: the same steps, the same debates. But I’m sure that there will come a medical school, ultimately, in Bangor. I also have a message for the managers in the health service to work much harder and with greater confidence to retain and to look after and to care for our young doctors, so that they remain in the health service here in Wales. We need to retain the brightest and most talented here in this nation. Thank you.