Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:52 pm on 6 February 2019.
Well, a fifth of the patients at the Countess of Chester Hospital come from Wales, and last week I questioned your colleague the finance Minister after the Countess of Chester Hospital reported in December that delayed transfers of care—better known to some people as bedblocking—for patients from Wales had gone up 26 per cent compared to the previous year, whilst falling 24 per cent for patients in west Wales. And their chief finance officer said there's extra capacity that the west Cheshire system is putting in and we've got to see some extra capacity being put in by Wales. The finance Minister said that she would refer that to you.
Only this morning, I and five other AMs received an e-mail from a whistleblower describing themselves as 'a concerned Betsi Cadwaladr NHS supporter', which said that the health board has unsurprisingly failed to break even in any of the years since being placed in special measures by you, and that management was wasting valuable resources and public money on IT systems such as the health roster clinical activity management IT system, which has cost over £200,000. No analysis was done on the initial trial, there was no proper business case carried out, the project failure has been hidden from the public, this had been trialled unsuccessfully in 2015 with negative feedback, and the consensus from medical experts was the system wasn't fit for purpose but it still went ahead. As I concluded last week when questioning the finance Minister, what is going on, Minister, because the buck really does stop with you?