Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:39 pm on 13 March 2018.
Thank you, Presiding Officer. First Minister, in relation to ambulance response times, with the new categories, the Government does seem to have made progress. But we do know over the last couple of months, across the United Kingdom, ambulance response times have been under pressure. Recently in the press, there have been examples of extreme waits that patients and people have had to wait for ambulances. I cite a gentleman in Dinas Powys, who waited 16 hours to receive an ambulance, I cite an example yesterday in the South Wales Evening Post, where a lady was taken to hospital after such a long wait for an ambulance, and returned home only to find the ambulance turning up 20 hours later in west Wales. In my own region, yesterday, in Cowbridge, a lady waited 10 and a half hours for the ambulance to turn up on Sunday, getting admitted to A&E at 01:15 in the morning on Monday morning. I hope that you can recognise that there are these cases out there. I don't look to you to comment on those individual cases, because I appreciate that you can't do that, but does the Government recognise that there is a real issue when it comes to certain waiting times across the whole of Wales for the Welsh ambulance service to respond? And, if you do recognise that, what measures are you putting in place to address those deeply distressing wait times that families, patients and, indeed, the paramedics and operators of the ambulance service have to deal with?