Can I thank the Cabinet Secretary for bringing the statement forward today? I think that repeating information is the bane of a patient's life and a common cause for complaint, and I do believe that digital technology, used in the right way, will certainly help to take our health service into the twenty-first century. I believe that more and more people want to take ownership of their own healthcare data, and I was very pleased, Cabinet Secretary, to read in your statement of the success of the Welsh patient referral system to help GPs. However, you also refer in your statement—you make the comment that,

'there is clear evidence of the growing use of digital to provide care locally, it is not yet at the scale I expect'.

Could you please go into more detail as to what you expect, what the hold-ups are, what hasn't happened and what the lessons are that have been learnt so far in the progression of that?

I note with interest the desire to roll a similar referral scheme out to dentistry and optometry, and I look forward to seeing how that works. I would like to understand what controls might be in place to ensure that health boards across Wales are training their staff appropriately and well, because the weakest link in a data trail is actually, indeed, literally the weakest link, and can cause that data to be corrupted, to be inadvertently misused, and we need to make sure people understand the responsibility that they have towards ensuring patient data is absolutely correct. Could you please perhaps give us an overview about how you're going to protect all of this data that we are collecting, and ensure that there is adequate data protection?

I do note that the parliamentary review flagged this up as being incredibly important, and I do think it will make healthcare provision far more efficient, and we will no longer, perhaps, as Assembly Members, have to listen to patients who have written to us with stories of turning up to see a consultant after waiting for x months only to find that their notes haven't followed through, or the x-rays haven't followed through, or the blood test results haven't followed through, because it's such a colossal waste of their time and the NHS's time.

I would like to understand how radical you intend to be, Cabinet Secretary. I have floated before the idea of patients being in control of their data. I would like to see every patient in Wales have a credit card with all their NHS data on it. As somebody who inadvertently, for a gruesome 18 months, became an NHS frequent flyer, I can tell you that it would absolutely have helped me to have been able to access my data, understand what the issues were, understand what had happened, understand what hadn't happened, and, more importantly, be able to take that data to all the other people who were involved in the care that I so excellently received from the NHS. How are you going to make sure that people are empowered so they no longer have to write in and ask for their NHS information and that we understand that it's their information and they have that absolute right to it?

Finally, I'd like to just touch on how bold you intend to be in terms of the true digitisation of the NHS. If you look to Europe, many European countries—Germany and France, for example—do not have a paper trail in their hospitals. Everything just goes straight onto laptops, into tablets, and, of course, the great advantage of that is that, when somebody picks it up to put somebody's observations in, they can immediately see if that patient's supposed to have a particular medicine at a certain time, or needs key information.

I will just end, if I may, Deputy Presiding Officer, with a rather vaguely amusing, although perhaps not quite so amusing at the time, story of when I was lying there in hospital, and this rather important doctor came bustling in on a Sunday to do the ward round, and he picked up my admittedly not inconsiderable file that was sitting at the end of my bed and rattled through it, and then he said, 'Oh, Mrs Burns, so how did the operation go?', to which I replied, 'I haven't had an operation; I'm in here recovering from sepsis.' You know, it was just a game: 'Let's look at it', no real use of it. Let's make this data really useful and make sure that mistakes aren't made, that information gets to the right place at the right time, and I would support you, Cabinet Secretary, in being as ambitious as you possibly can be to make sure that we use this as a way of making our NHS and our social care system as effective as it possibly can be.