Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:43 pm on 25 April 2018.
You talk about patients cancelling their own operations, and it is something that we hear from you and your Government quite often, that it's often the patient's fault for turning up in hospital when they shouldn't and for being ill perhaps when they shouldn't. I can tell you about stories of people having their operation cancelled when they're on the trolley at the door of the theatre, and not for the first time—for the second, for the third time. We cannot continually blame the patient for taking the wrong course of action. We know that cancellations happen for all sorts of different reasons, and, yes, of course, some patients cancel their own treatments. We know of administrative problems—operations being booked in for when clinicians are on leave. It shouldn’t happen, but, okay, it happens from time to time. We know we have staff shortages. I won't go there today—I'll have plenty of opportunity to come back to that one. But, quite often, at the heart of why an operation is cancelled is that, somewhere in the system, there's a bed missing. We've lost 1,000 beds since 2011, either at district general hospitals or in community hospitals. And, yes, we need to get patients home or to their usual place of residence as quickly as we can, but I am absolutely convinced that the loss of community beds is costing our NHS very, very dearly and it's costing our patients very, very dearly. Will you agree with me that the time has come to reinstate lost community beds? Because otherwise what we will see is patients being trapped in a system and operations, yes, being cancelled time and time again and the detrimental effect that that has on patients, not just in the short-, but in the long-term too.