Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:36 pm on 6 February 2018.
Thank you for those questions. On your final point, I think I've answered most of those points in response to Rhun ap Iorwerth, but, as I say, I expect all my officials—if not me, then my officials will be meeting with both the Royal College of General Practitioners and the BMA general practice committee to understand the practical steps that we'll need to take in rolling out a new system, in addition to providing a fuller explanation when we're able to about the reasons for the choice that has been made following the procurement.
On your point about workforce—how we develop and maintain a workforce—there's something here about exactly that: what will the workforce do? How much of our workforce will be needed to maintain our current systems and to sustain them and how much will we have to do to develop new products as well and then how will we then assess the product development that takes place outside the health service? We have lots of examples of different Welsh companies that are able to develop products that could and should help the service. There's a challenge about how quickly we assess that. So, Health Technology Wales should be able to help us assess the efficacy of some of this. We then need to get, at a much faster pace, into how we then adopt that technology and make choices across the country as well.
We invested about £10.5 million recently, in this financial year. I've approved that to accelerate some of our national systems. That should provide us with greater robustness in dealing with cyber attacks. The recent outage wasn't actually an issue about cyber attacks, but it does actually highlight the need to continue to improve our systems as well rather than simply assuming that if it hasn't fallen over it will all be okay. There's something there about the more general message for our healthcare systems as well about not waiting for something to go wrong before we look to improve it. Again, that's part of what this statement is supposed to set out.
In terms of people's ability to order prescriptions online, I don't think that's really about Choose Pharmacy. That's really about a proper use of myhealthonline or a successor product, and thinking about how easy it is to use for the individual citizen and also for the practice as well. We had about 220,000-odd people sign up to use myhealthonline but, actually, in a country of 3.1 million people, that's not enough. It's not a great enough proportion who are able to use it and access it and equally then to make sure that our general practices are able then and willing to properly use the whole system. There's also something about, for example, the greater use of texts and other things, about simple things that have actually improved people's awareness of what's going on and actually are just making sure that we don't lose time in the way that our appointments and infrastructure work as well. There's great waste and inefficiency in that, and digital technology will help to be part of the answer to try and reduce that. That should mean a better use of the healthcare professionals' time.
We talked previously about the use of telemedicine and telecare, and it's an issue both for hospital-based care but also in local healthcare as well—not just the comments that Lee Waters has made, but thinking about the opportunity to provide advice, guidance, care and treatment with a healthcare professional as well as to make sure we move information around our system to make sure it's getting to the right healthcare professionals to help make a choice, to have an informed conversation with the individual citizen. I think this goes back to Angela Burns's points at the start as well about the safe sharing of data and the effective use of data. The encouragement is that we have actually set ourselves on a path where we are looking to make that easier to do, to make it easier to share that data across our health and care system, and the other encouragement in that is I think we've turned the corner. A few years ago—well, certainly when I first became an Assembly Member, there was much greater reticence between health and care professional groups about sharing of data and information. I think we're in a different place now. Not only that but the public are ahead of where we are and ahead of where I think professionals are. They want and they expect us to be able to share that information, to help them to make choices, to make sure they don't have to repeat information to more than one person, and because they want us to be more joined up. That's where they want us to be. So, this isn't just an enabler, it's essential to delivering the vision for the future. Some of it happens now and we should celebrate and recognise that. The challenge as ever is how much more we could and should do to deliver better care, better outcomes and, actually, better value for all of us through our health and care system.