Respiratory Illness

Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 3:06 pm on 23 May 2018.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 3:06, 23 May 2018

I'm happy to confirm that there are conversations that do take place across Government, not just with the Cabinet Secretary, but with the Minister, who leads on the clean air plan for Wales. There's something here about understanding the contribution of the national health service and what we can do both to improve the quality of air, but the way the national health service itself operates. It's the biggest employer in the country; we were talking earlier about the fact that it's the only public service to have an expanding number of staff, and more than 90,000 people are employed by the national health service. So, how people get to work, how we make it easier for them to get to work and how we actually then improve the running of significant parts of the NHS estate are part of what we can do, as well, of course, as thinking about the consequences of poor air quality in terms of health service need.

I visited a fantastic example of looking at the way in which we reduce our footprint in actually having a smaller number of movements on and around hospital sites recently in St Woolos, looking at the new Sterimelt innovation, which is actually converting some of the equipment used in hospital theatres and converting it into larger blocks that can then actually be used for 3D printer filament. So, that's actually a really good way to have put a waste product, that was previously going to a landfill with lots of lorry movements on and off, previous to that technology—reducing the number of lorry movements needed to do that. Now we actually have that product turning into a different, useful product. And the good thing is it's been developed by a company in Wales, still based in Wales—I should say, Presiding Officer, within my constituency—but we actually have a real opportunity to see that go into a more useful product to be delivered again through the national health service.