Part of 2. 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:18 pm on 3 October 2017.
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?