Thank you to Russell George for bringing this particular topic to the Chamber today, and it is one of those occasions where we are in broad agreement. Indeed, noting that you’ve had a presentation from Dylan Jones, who coincidentally—and I want to place on record my congratulations to him, belatedly, following his recognition at the Welsh Pharmacy Awards as the joint winner of community pharmacist of the year. The Deputy Presiding Officer will, of course, be interested to be reminded that the other joint winner is Jacqui Campbell from Prestatyn, and Pritchards in Prestatyn where I launched the NHS Wales stickers and in a range of other healthcare providers. There’s something here again about understanding who’s part of the healthcare team, what those local healthcare teams look like now and what they could and should look like in the future. Llanidloes is one of those examples of where we think that the rest of healthcare providers should look more and more like this, because it’s in line with the direction of travel that this Government is already taking, and the sorts of changes we want to support to help sustain and improve local healthcare as well. It’s fair to say that not every change in this direction are ones that are particularly supported locally at the time, Llanidloes being a good example where not everyone was in favour of the sorts of changes that are now being made. I’m pleased to see that there’s been real movement, and that’s across parties as well, and thinking about the sorts of teams that we’re talking about, the approach in Llanidloes is consistent with the one that was set out within the national primary care plan. I’m thinking about something that Lee Waters said in the Chamber as well about the approach being taken in Kidwelly, where a difference in the model of care has been really important in sustaining local healthcare rather than seeing it collapse, and only and solely being a focus on local GP services.

I think it’s fair to point out some of the underpinning principles within the successful Llanidloes programme. The first is collaboration, because the health board, the GPs and the pharmacies had full and equal roles in developing the new service in Llanidloes. There’s something there about local stakeholders coming together, not just the power to agree, but actually a shared recognition of the risks in not agreeing what the future could and should look like, and these are almost always people who live within the communities that they serve. So, there’s a real direct interest in seeing the services continue successfully. We know that patients are satisfied with the service. They’re seen quickly and feel that they’re efficiently dealt with. Space has been created for GPs to spend more time doing what only they could and should do as well, in particular seeing people with complex needs. But also the community pharmacists are recognising that it’s professionally rewarding. There’s a recognition with other healthcare professionals that there’s more that community pharmacy can do as well.

There are two other points I would make. There’s one about information sharing, and what we’ve been able to do to enable the wider system to share information safely, in particular community pharmacies being engaged in a network where they can see a version of the GP record. That’s really important, and I’m delighted to confirm that we’re ahead of where we want to be in Choose Pharmacy in the roll-out to community pharmacies across Wales. I indicated that by the end of March 2018 I expected half of our community pharmacies in Wales to be online. We are already over half at this point, so we’re five to six months ahead of where we expected to be. That’s a real success story, because people recognise in examples like Llanidloes and other communities within Wales that it’s been a real benefit to everyone within the local healthcare community, but particularly a real benefit to local citizens. And, yes, the other part includes independent prescribing and, of course, there are a range of community pharmacies who are already independent prescribers. We seek to encourage a range of other people in addition to doctors to have the ability to be independent prescribers, using their clinical skills to do so. There are a range of nurses who can do so and a range of other healthcare professionals—pharmacists, therapists and others—all within their own clinical competence. So, there is a collaborative and multidisciplinary approach to be taken. That’s a key feature of not only what’s happened in Llanidloes, but more broadly in the national Pacesetter programme for local healthcare. And, of course, that’s supported by a fund of £43 million, including £4 million that is in that national Pacesetter programme, and there are many other examples across Wales of what that looks like, either within or outside that programme. Part of my challenge and optimism about the service is that we do have examples of what is working, improving local healthcare for the people that work in those local healthcare teams, but, crucially, for the citizen as well. And for all the challenges that we face, in addition to other nations within the UK, we have good examples and are able to say, ‘This works in Wales already.’ There’s an example in rural Wales that works, and we really should be able to roll that out in different parts of rural Wales. The same with Valleys Wales, urban Wales as well. And, actually, there’s lots of learning to be taken already. Our consistent challenge is how consistently and how rapidly we’re able to do that across the country.

And I mentioned earlier the Choose Pharmacy platform. That was a deliberate choice to be made. NHS Wales Informatics Service, often maligned, but they helped to develop the new IT platform, and the Welsh Government then invested nearly £800,000 in making that available. In addition to that, we have systems in hospital that allow modernised patient information to be transferred between the GP and the hospital as well. So, we really are doing more to share information, but we still want to do more, we still want to move quicker than we currently do.