Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services — Postponed from 8 November – in the Senedd at 2:36 pm on 15 November 2017.
I thank the Member for the question. We will continue to discuss not just doctor recruitment and doctor numbers, but all of our healthcare professionals and how they work together. I think it's a mistake to simply look at one group of professionals in isolation to others, as we progressively talk—[Interruption.]—as we progressively talk about, for example, changing the way in which hospital services work, moving more care to become local, as work progresses within local healthcare clusters, as we have GPs working in different numbers with different groups of professionals. So, we need to constantly look at and review the numbers of people we wish to train and recruit within our healthcare system, and, of course, doctors play a hugely important role within our healthcare system.
The creation of Health Education and Improvement Wales has been a deliberate choice that we have made, based on a well-understood review, to bring more intelligence to the numbers of different healthcare professionals we need to recruit and we need to train. That is why Health Education and Improvement Wales will come into being in April of next year, and I look forward to having a more rounded conversation about all of the different healthcare professionals we will need to continue to have in a well-functioning and high-quality compassionate national health service.