Diolch, Dirprwy Lywydd. I would like to formally move the two amendments tabled in my name, and I thank the Welsh Conservatives for bringing forward this important debate today. As you can see from my amendments, I agree with 99 per cent of the Welsh Conservatives' motion. I cannot support granting priority treatment to NHS staff, and, while I have sympathy with the need to get staff back on the front line as quickly as possible, I fear this proposal would lead to a two-tier NHS. We could see a situation where an NHS worker and a police officer are both waiting for a transplant and, under these proposals, the NHS worker would have priority, regardless of the clinical priorities. I therefore urge Members to support amendment 3.

Getting to the crux of this debate, it is regrettable that Wales is facing staff shortages in a number of key areas, and it's because we have had woefully inadequate workforce planning in recent decades. Wales has failed to take account of demographic changes and the pressures this will place upon health and social care services. As highlighted by the parliamentary review of health and social care, the population of Wales is set to grow by 6.1 per cent. The number of over-65s is set to increase by 44 per cent, and the number of working adults will decrease by over 5 per cent over the next two decades.

Unfortunately, age rarely comes alone. Over the same time frame, the number of adults living with a long-term limiting condition will increase by almost a quarter. The situation we find ourselves in today is made much worse because a lack of future planning has led to shortages of many key staff. Year on year, month to month, we have around 20,000 patients waiting for more than 36 weeks for treatment. We have seen a 400 per cent increase in the numbers of patients waiting more than a year for surgery. Thirty-nine per cent of Welsh people find it difficult to make a GP appointment, and, according to the Royal College of GPs, we are suffering from a severe GP shortage. Wales has 136 training places and, if we are to consider training places per patient, we should be training 184.

The royal college believes we need to train 200 new GPs each year in order to meet the demand and account for the large number of GPs approaching retirement age. But it's not just GPs we're short of. Wales has the lowest number of consultant psychiatrists per head of population, despite Wales having a higher than average proportion of people suffering from mental ill health. Wales has some of the worst cancer survival rates in the western world, yet we are desperately short of clinical oncologists, medical physicists, radiographers and diagnosticians. We are desperately short of nurses. The NHS is currently spending £1 million per week on agency nurses just to cover shifts.