Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:46 pm on 9 January 2018.
First Minister, the story that you tell is of a service that's under pressure but coping well, but there's another story as well and that's being told by the media, of hospitals being 'like a battlefield' for NHS staff. Both of those stories can't be true, and I think that you know that winter preparations have not been good enough. Isn't that why we had an apology from Vaughan Gething for cancelled operations? Isn't that why we are hearing the claim from the Royal College of Emergency Medicine that patient safety is being compromised daily, and that the solution is more capacity? The Welsh NHS needs more beds, it needs more nurses and it needs more doctors. The £10 million pounds announced over the weekend came with an admission that pressures across health and social care are above those anticipated. Why do you underestimate these pressures every year? Do you now accept that the Cabinet Secretary was wrong to make the claim in November that the service was in the best position possible to cope with the winter, and do you accept that you were wrong to cut the number of hospital beds?