The Welsh NHS

Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 2:52 pm on 10 January 2018.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 2:52, 10 January 2018

Thank you for the series of detailed questions. I appreciate we only have 20 minutes on the agenda for the three questions, so I'll try and be brief in response. The questions about the money and the broader look back to winter this year to try and learn for the next year, I think I dealt with in response to Angela Burns. There's a question for the Government, but also for the health service, together with local government and housing colleagues as well, in understanding what we've done this year and what more we need to do in years to come as we progressively design and deliver a more integrated system that understands the needs of the citizen and how we deal with them.

That does come on to perhaps the most interesting part of your series of questions about how the public can be part of this as well. This isn't about blaming the public, but about how we equip the public to make different choices and how we make sure those choices are available. The Choose Well campaign encourages people to think differently, and, just before Christmas, we saw the ambulance service producing a list of calls they'd had for coughs and colds and shoulder pain that weren't 999 calls at all. So, that is a real part of our system, but actually we need to manage demand differently and change expectations around that. Actually, the investment we're making in pharmacy is a good example of wanting to do that.

I expect that, in the lessons to be learned during this winter and from the end of this winter, we won't just have a report and a dry report for operational matters, but one that will have to take account of the real experience of staff in every part of our system, to then try and plan ahead for not just the year to come but, in the response to the parliamentary review, for the medium and longer term challenges that all of us face as our country changes, as demand goes up and, as we all know, as money is tighter and health and social care seem to have less money than before, together with other public services, to manage an ever-increasing amount of demand.