This report was published in October, and I'm obviously keen to understand why we're only debating it now. I appreciate you have to wait for the Government's response, but as I'm not a member of the committee, it is important that we are all absorbing the evidence that you're gathering, because we are talking about half our whole budget, and therefore we all have a duty to ensure that the money we are allocating to health is being spent in the best possible way.

I think primary care clusters are hugely important as a way of breaking down artificial barriers—artificial demarcation lines—between different professionals. It's also a way of tackling underperforming practices, or struggling practices, like the case that Julie Morgan's just described where the practice went out of business and nobody was prepared to take it on. Had they known about it earlier, had the cluster arrangements been closer, perhaps another practice would have been ready to take it on, particularly if they weren't presented with a surprise.

Today, I've had an excellent experience with a practice manager. I needed to very quickly establish whether a particular form that's called DS1500 had been provided to the DWP to enable somebody to get the attendance allowance that people are entitled to at the end of their life. So, this is an urgent matter. I have nothing but praise for the practice manager. This is a practice manager task. It's nothing to do with a GP in the sense that I'm not seeking clinical advice; I'm seeking administrative advice. I need to know whether this form has been sent. When we managed to establish that the DWP had lost the form, she immediately agreed to send it again and to ensure that it got there in time. So, I would just like to say that any GP who is not delegating the day-to-day administrative management of their practice to a practice manager is not using their clinical skills effectively. They should not be needing to worry about whether or not the equipment that people need to examine patients is available. That is something that somebody else should be doing.

Equally, I do find it very frustrating when I visit pharmacists to learn that GP practices are resistant to sharing the information about what medication patients are receiving. This should be available through the IT system, to enable the pharmacist, who is the specialist in medicines, to be seeing exactly what cocktail of drugs this patient is getting and whether or not what's been written on the prescription is appropriate to that individual. I'm afraid it's not uncommon, with prescriptions, for the point to be in the wrong place, and that can be extremely worrying. Of course, pharmacists are the front line. Everybody knows stories of the difficulties of getting an appointment with the GP, whereas with the pharmacist, you can walk in and you will get the advice immediately. So, I think that clusters need to be working much more closely with pharmacists, as well as other professionals, who will enable us to share the workload more effectively in line with prudent healthcare. I read, with some puzzlement, that pharmacists weren't always invited. It's not that everybody needs to be at the cluster meeting on every single occasion. It all depends on what is the subject that's going to be discussed at a particular meeting.

Should the health boards be more or less involved? Well, we always have to follow the money because if health boards aren't prepared to ensure that the money is being passed down from secondary to primary care, we are never going to get the change that we need to ensure that we have a sustainable health service.

I'd just like to finish by reminding people that I mentioned in the Assembly previously the case study of Canterbury, New Zealand, which has spent several years getting more integrated care between primary, secondary and community care, and that that has prevented the ballooning of demands on hospital care, which we all need to see. We don't need reminding as to what's going on out in the world today. So, we need to learn quickly and we need to get on with this rather than delaying further. This has to be one way forward.