I’d like to thank Plaid Cymru for bringing about this debate and the opportunity to speak in it. I agree with the sentiment behind this motion. Staff shortages within the NHS are detrimental to patient care. Not a day goes by when we aren’t confronted by news articles outlining the impact that staff shortages are having on NHS Wales. We have seen a 400 per cent increase in the number of patients waiting more than a year for surgery, and 39 per cent of Welsh people find it difficult to make a GP appointment. It’s not just the impact that staff shortages have on the patient, we have to consider the impact this has on NHS employees. Staff shortages put additional pressure on existing staff.

In my experience, throughout the recess period, as I highlighted, there was a hospital within my region where staff were extremely short on the cardiac unit—so much so that they were asking a member of staff to double back and do a double shift. So, in order to meet this demand, our hardworking and dedicated NHS staff are forced to work longer and spend less time with patients. This is affecting staff morale and more and more staff are leaving the NHS, exacerbating the situation.

Over 5 per cent of hospital staff are on sick leave and health boards are forced to rely on expensive agency staff to make up the shortfall. As a result, spending on agency nurses and locum doctors has skyrocketed and has forced many health boards to overspend. Lack of proper workforce planning over the last few decades has left us in a perilous situation. We have recruitment shortages in all specialties, and yet demand for services is rising. We are not yet in a situation where patient safety is routinely put at risk, but unless we can plug the gap then that will become the case.

According to the Royal College of GPs, almost a quarter of the GP workforce could retire in the next 10 years. They are calling for an increase in the number of GP training places, to rise to 200 per year. When you consider we had only 127 training places this year, this shows you the scale of the problem facing us.

Yesterday, we heard the news that stroke patients in south Wales, as has been highlighted by Rhun, are being denied the best available treatment because of the three radiologists able to perform a thrombectomy: one has retired, one is on sick leave, and the third has accepted a job elsewhere. A shortage of radiologists means that we have more and more people waiting longer and longer for diagnostic tests.

We also have to ensure that any changes we introduce to health and social care do not place extra burdens upon existing staff. The Welsh Government’s proposals for phase 2 implementation of the Regulation and Inspection of Social Care (Wales) Act 2016 will see the removal of the requirement to have a minimum number of nurses in care homes that provide nursing care. This will have a detrimental impact on other services such as district nursing, which are already struggling to meet demand that massively outstrips capacity.

We are approaching a crisis point and I look forward to hearing how the Welsh Government plan to approach workforce planning in the future. We need a medical recruitment campaign that prioritises domestic students and encourages young people in Wales to become radiologists, psychologists, physiotherapists, and the whole raft of healthcare professionals, not just nurses and doctors. We need to plan for an ageing population and an ageing workforce. And, above all, we need to plan for a workforce that can meet future demand and deliver patient care that is safe, effective and affordable. The growing reliance on expensive agency staff and locum doctors—