I’m very pleased to take part in this very important debate. Following on from what Suzy Davies has said, I’ll start with the first point, which is the key importance of social care. Now, as a doctor, you’d expect me to talk on and on about the health service, but as has been mentioned several times in the Chamber, without social care, the NHS will fall into ruin as well, and we have to address that. Increasingly, my party favours creating a national care service.

We do have a national health service. Back in the 1930s, we looked at health, and it was dispersed and separate, and there were local authority elements that provided healthcare, there were charities and private bodies, and you had to pay to go to see your GP. Fast-forward to now, when you look at the care sector, there are local authority elements, there are private sector elements and there are charitable elements. How about bringing them all together? Because if it was good enough for the NHS, then, certainly, it’s good enough to have a care service on the same lines. That would bring those who work in the care sector to the same level of respect as those who work in the NHS. As you’ve already mentioned, people always look at nurses and doctors with more respect than those who provide social care. Over the years we’ve managed to downgrade the value of care in our societies, but yet, that is the most important point—the ability to deal with people and to be compassionate with people, to be kind to other people, and that’s the care service. We’ve lost that in the way that we deal with our patients, not just in the health service, but also in our care service.

And, yes, that means, certainly, in the care service, with an increasing number of people suffering from dementia and so forth, that we need to provide that service increasingly through the medium of Welsh because, with dementia, it's your second language that disappears first. That is, for those who speak Welsh as a first language when they develop dementia, it’s only Welsh that they can speak when they’ve developed dementia. And there are several kinds of stroke that have the same impact. You lose the ability to speak in your second language. There are a number of countries across the world with the same kind of experience. When you have a country with more than one language spoken, you lose that ability to speak your second language—with dementia, increasingly, and with strokes.

So, we have to ensure that we plan our workforce to reflect our society. There are more than 0.5 million Welsh speakers here in Wales, and we want to create 1 million of them, and therefore our care workforce, as well as our NHS workforce, should reflect that basic point. As well as what Rhun ap Iorwerth said, you improve the quality of the diagnosis when you can engage with someone in their first language. You can understand the diagnosis, and we come to a diagnosis, as doctors and nurses, 90 per cent of the time on the basis of what the patient tells us on their patient history. So, if you have a better quality of history, you arrive at a quicker diagnosis without having to have blood tests, x-rays, ultrasound and so forth. That provision, therefore, saves money ultimately.

I’ll just finish now. Junior doctors in our hospitals are under a great deal of pressure. There is a call for the NHS corporately to look after its staff. Well, I would make it a special plea that we should now look after our junior doctors in hospitals. I’ve mentioned this before. Back in the day, when I was a young doctor in a hospital, there was a familial element. The administrators and other doctors looked after us, everyone looked after us, and we’ve lost that element. Our junior doctors complain that they’re overworked and that they have to fill gaps in the rota when they’re already on their knees. They have to fight for days off to study, fight for days off to sit exams and fight for days off even to get married. This is not fair, and people think, ‘Well, this is the future of our GP workforce.’ We all start off as junior doctors in hospitals, but if we lose those, if they move abroad to be doctors in Australia and so forth, where they can work fewer hours for more money, and Bondi Beach isn’t far away, it's no wonder that the workforce is leaving. We need to prepare for the future by dealing with our junior doctors in a far better way. Thank you very much.