Questions Without Notice from Party Spokespeople

Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:41 pm on 25 April 2018.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 2:41, 25 April 2018

I do recognise that this is an issue that causes significant inconvenience and worry for any patient or their family when an operation is cancelled, whether it's a minor or a more significant one. There's challenge about individual issues, and if he wants to contact me with the particular circumstances that he's mentioned then I'll happily take them up with the health board about the reasons behind that. As well as those times where there are individual issues, there are system-wide challenges that we recognise and actually the majority of operations that are postponed are postponed by the individual in question as opposed to by the health service. Our quest is both to understand why that happens and to avoid those operations being cancelled, whether they're by the citizen or by the service. And, on that, I have to say I'm rather more sceptical about the value of financial incentives or sanctions to do so in terms of the impact that will have on the system, because, when the health service cancels an operation, it is largely because they don't have the capacity to do so and that is often about the overtopping of unscheduled care into the primary care system or is due to unforeseen staff unavailability. I don't think that financial incentives or sanctions would necessarily help that. What I do think, though, is that our ability to plan and deliver across the service is more important. That's why we've brought together regional planning fora in south-east Wales, in mid and west Wales, and it's why we continue to support the health board in north Wales not only to achieve a significant improvement in referral-to-treatment times to the end of the financial year that's just finished, but also they'll continue to receive support for the future.