They do indeed and, in fact, it is these dedicated and hard-working staff who have, over the last 10 days, raised a significant number of concerns with me. We've had royal colleges coming out with commentary and statements about the enormous pressure their staff have been under. I've met with royal colleges in the last few days, I've met with doctors, nurses, front-line staff and an ambulance worker. They all talk about the same thing: comments such as they've 'never seen the Welsh NHS in such a bad way', their colleagues 'are at breaking point' and front-line staff 'are under immense pressure'. The BMA themselves have said that one health board area in Wales had absolutely no cover whatsoever in terms of GP doctors. We've lost over 2,000 ambulance hours in the last seven or eight days. The Royal College of Emergency Medicine said that some people are waiting over 80 hours in emergency departments before being admitted into hospital. 

Cabinet Secretary, this is an enormous issue. I absolutely accept that you are not personally responsible for front-line issues that go wrong. I absolutely accept that there has been an uplift in problems this winter and that this winter was a bit tougher than everyone thought it was going to be. But, my concerns are that you've given some £50 million prior to winter to prepare for this and what I would like to ask you is to undertake an urgent assessment of how that £50 million was spent. Did it get to the front line and, if so, where, how, and what did it ameliorate? Did managers involve the right people in planning? Because GPs say they were not involved in winter preparation. Hospital doctors say they were not involved in winter preparations. Emergency department unit leads say they were not involved in winter preparations. There was no account taken of the three, four days, so, effectively, we had two whole weeks with very, very light bank holiday-style cover. Social services were basically absent for two weeks. We had enormous delayed transfers of care. The Heath themselves had two whole wards full of people waiting to go home.

Would you please also accept, or look at the managers within the NHS, because we seem to be great on strategy, but putting it into action is difficult? When you have a nurse or a bed manager saying, 'I'm not going to open up a bed, put an extra bed on that ward, because that one bed will make that ward risky', I totally accept that, but risk is about the balance of risk. So, what is worse: having one bed open on a ward, or having a person on a trolley for 80 hours in an A&E department? So, Cabinet Secretary, I'm asking you to make sure that we are holding the management, the management of the NHS, holding their feet to the fire on those issues.

You've just awarded, in the last few days, another £10 million. That is incredibly welcome, but we need to make sure that that £10 million goes to the front line and solves these problems. The Health and Social Care Committee held an excellent inquiry. We came up with a strong report on winter preparedness. The people came to us and told us they weren't being involved. They're still saying it today. You need to find out what went wrong, and I would ask you to really, really drill down into this, because something somewhere just didn't work. And as you started off saying, we have a lot of excellent people who are working their socks off and are under immense pressure. It's our job to lift that pressure off their shoulders.