Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 3:48 pm on 3 July 2018.
Julian Tudor Hart's work will continue to challenge not just this part of the national health service system, but actually every part of the developed world. The challenge is that those who most need medical care are the least likely to receive it and utilise it, whereas those with the least need of healthcare tend to use health services more, and more effectively. That's a challenge for a range of our public services, actually, not just the health service. That's why it's particularly interesting—and I mentioned it in my opening—that you can see both Cwm Taf and Aneurin Bevan university health boards making real progress on their inverse care law programme work. That's a real cause for celebration for us, that they are turning the corner on health inequality. The challenge now, as with so many others, is to be able to roll it out more consistently across the country.
I recognise again the points made about the communal and the individual contribution and benefit with and from the health service. I have found time to watch To Provide All People. I particularly enjoyed it: a range of stories, and the actors were reading words provided by people describing their real experience of the health service in a range of different areas. It wasn't a work of fiction. It was telling the stories of people in and around the service. It was particularly poignant for me because that's where my father passed away—Nevill Hall. I remember getting a tearful call from my mother and going to the house that they had retired to in Llangynidr and finding the remnants of where my father had fallen over, visiting him in hospital, talking to him. I was the last one in my family to talk to him in Nevill Hall. I don't just remember the fact that they cared for my father, but I particularly remember the kindness and the compassion they showed to my mother. Because she could not accept that he wasn't coming back. When he was on a ventilator she didn't believe that he wasn't going to come back, and the fact that they did that gently, but they did it as they should have done, not to provide false hope, I thought was a great kindness. It's that kindness and compassion that I think people remember when they think of the best part of our health service—not just the machines, but the people who provide and deliver the care.