Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:41 pm on 23 May 2018.
It's a damning indictment of your Government, as I say, that, if you are continuing to spend more, we're getting less results in terms of full-time equivalent nursing numbers, as I have factually stated, based on your Stats Wales figures. I am merely aligning myself with those facts as your statisticians put them forward. Now, we also know that the Welsh NHS continues to demonstrate a heavy reliance on nurses working overtime—71 per cent of nurses working overtime at least once a week. That's 16,000 nurses having to go over and above the call of duty every week because of understaffing. Just recently, we heard those BBC figures, based on FOI, that Betsi Cadwaladr lost over 77,000 days to staff experiencing stress and anxiety, which illustrates the problem of overworked staff in understaffed environments. Now, three options for you: you can either send a letter to the BBC saying that they've got their figures wrong, you can repeat what you said earlier that it's not about stress but about better reporting of stress, or you can accept that in recent years Wales has been substantially understaffed with full-time fully qualified nurses, and that as a result the nurses that we have are under unreasonable pressure and patients haven't received the very care your Government admitted could only be achieved through safe staffing levels.