1. Will the First Minister make a statement on ambulance response times on Ynys Môn? OAQ51736

We expect citizens who have a clinical need for an emergency ambulance response to receive one as quickly as possible, whenever required. Despite increased demand in recent months, the Welsh ambulance service has continued to meet the target in the Betsi Cadwaladr health board area.

Thank you for that response. Ambulances in the north-west, in Anglesey and across north Wales, I'm sure, have on their sides a large sticker for the FAST campaign, which relates to the Stroke Association campaign encouraging people to phone 999. The slogan is 'when strokes strike, act FAST'. Unfortunately, phoning quickly doesn’t lead to an ambulance arriving quickly. There are two recent examples. The port of Holyhead called for an ambulance for a patient who feared that he’d suffered a stroke and they eventually had to take the patient themselves to Ysbyty Gwynedd and saw eight ambulances parked there. Another recent example is that of an 88-year-old woman—a constituent of mine—who was concerned that she’d had a stroke, waited six hours for an ambulance and then waited another two hours outside the hospital to be transferred to A&E. She passed away some hours later. We know that stroke is now an amber category call. Last week, a senior medical officer in north Wales told me that she was concerned about the categorisation there. Paramedics tell me regularly that they are concerned about categorising stroke calls as amber. So, when will the Government look at this, because lives truly are at stake?

I have to say that the model itself was drawn up by clinical professionals, and therefore it was they who considered the way in which we should do this. It wasn’t something that was done by politicians. It’s true to say that 65 per cent of red calls in Anglesey were responded to within eight minutes, but the Member has raised two issues in this Chamber, which of course are very important, and I would ask him to write to me so that I can consider once again what happened in those cases.

Six years ago, in February 2012, it was reported that a patient had to wait in an ambulance for more than seven hours outside of Ysbyty Gwynedd because of a hospital bed shortage. Last December, Betsi Cadwaladr University Local Health Board released figures showing that 1,010 patients had faced handovers of more than an hour outside their hospitals in October. Last month, with ambulances queuing outside Ysbyty Gwynedd's accident and emergency department, we saw coverage of a pensioner waiting 13 hours for an ambulance after her hip gave way. We know that December figures show that 17,400 patients waited more than the four-hour target time in A&E, with the highest portion—27 per cent—in Betsi Cadwaladr, and 1,460 waiting longer than 12 hours. When will your Government acknowledge that a 30 per cent cut in beds to 10,935 over the last two decades has rendered paramedics unable to offload patients quickly, causing ambulances to be delayed and therefore the next distress calls being unable to be responded to promptly, and will you reverse those bed cuts not only in the district general hospitals, but also in our communities, as called for increasingly by our general practitioners?

What I've said several times in the Chamber is that it's hugely important to ensure that we have a social care system that can get people out of hospital when it is timely for them to do so. And that is, of course, the reason why we have not cut social care spending in the way that England has. Health and social care run together. What I can say in terms of emergency calls, in the Betsi Cadwaladr health board area alone, the ambulance service received 11,232 emergency calls in December 2017, which is an average of 362 calls per day. That's 14 per cent up on the daily average for November 2017, and 9 per cent up on the daily average for December 2016. Despite that rise in demand, the national target for red calls was achieved in all seven health board areas in December. And we of course expect health boards to have plans in place to ensure as smooth a transition, and as swift a transition, as possible between ambulance and hospital.