Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:45 pm on 19 September 2018.
I tried to be polite to the Member in my second answer, to give him an opportunity to reconsider the track he was going down. I have to say that the orders are not just to re-engineer health in north Wales, but your plan—I assume on behalf of your party—to take a wrecking ball to the way we organise and run the national health service in Wales in every single part of the country is not something that I would support at all. The last thing that our health service needs is a major structural reorganisation such as the one that you have just proposed. It would be an additional distraction to delivering healthcare in the most challenging of circumstances, with additional financial pressure, the challenges of Brexit on the horizon, the additional public health challenges that we all know that we face, and an ageing population, and it would an additional barrier to integration within the health service, let alone to delivering the plan 'A Healthier Wales', which has been designed and agreed by health and local government, for the first time together working to deliver a joint health and social care plan with buy-in from the third sector and housing. I think the proposal that you make is foolish. It runs in exactly the opposite direction of every respected commentator and expert across health and social care. Even in England, Simon Stevens recognises they have got it wrong on dividing trusts from primary care. He is now looking at integrated models of care in England. He won't say, 'Look at Scotland or Wales' when he looks at them; he looks further afield. He can hardly say to the Tories in England that he likes the look of integrated healthcare models. Nobody who is serious about the organisation and running of a modern health service is agreeing with the plan that you propose, and I strongly suggest you go back and reconsider your position.