7. Will the First Minister make a statement on nurse recruitment in north Wales? (OAQ51115)[W]

Betsi Cadwaladr University Local Health Board, supported by our Train, Work, Live campaign, is actively recruiting additional nurses.

At the last count, 92 nurse posts at Wrexham Maelor Hospital were vacant, with a number of nurses approaching retirement age also. Now, the shortage of nurses means that specialist nurses regularly now have to work on general wards and it’s a daily crisis in the hospital, which is the largest in north Wales. The expensive foreign recruitment of the health board in India and Barcelona, through a private agency, has been an utter failure; only four nurses from India have managed to pass the language test. So, given the failure of your Government to plan the workforce over a number of years, and having placed Betsi Cadwaladr in special measures over two and a half years ago now, do you take responsibility for this awful situation?

We see that things are improving. For example, there’s been an increase in the number of nurses training in north Wales. That figure is now higher than in any year over the past decade. So, we have invested in recruitment and also, of course, in training. That means that there’s been an increase of 13 per cent in nursing places in Wales over this financial year. We’ve put a £95 million investment into training, and that means that 3,000 new students can now study healthcare programmes in Wales. It is challenging, of course, because people don’t wish to come to the United Kingdom any longer because of Brexit, and they feel that they wouldn’t be welcome now. Of course, that is something that happened last year, but in order to deal with that, we understand that we need to train more nurses in Wales. That is why we’ve seen a significant increase in the numbers being trained.