Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:39 pm on 29 January 2019.
Well, Llywydd, I do agree directly with the main point that Helen Mary Jones has made. If you think of staffing in the NHS, there are three consecutive issues that you have to think about. First of all, there is training of new staff to come into the NHS, and, for the fifth year in a row, we have record spend in supporting health professional education and training in Wales, with record numbers of people being trained to come into the nursing profession in Wales. The second issue is recruitment. Having trained people, you have to recruit them, and the number of nurses, midwives and health visitors in Wales was up by 134 again last year. We have a record high number of people recruited into the health service, but then we have to retain them in the way that the Member said. And the message I always gave to the health service, and I know it's repeated by Vaughan Gething, is that they must show maximum flexibility in order to retain the skilled and dedicated staff that they have. And the question should not be, 'How does this person fit into the health board's patterns?' but, 'What can the health board do to enable that person's needs to be responded to flexibly?' in order that we can retain that person who has been often expensively trained, where investment has been made in them while they work for the health service, and where there is every reason why a local health board should do everything they can, in as flexible a way as they can, to go on retaining the service of that person for as long as they possibly can.