Improving Hospital Waiting Times

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:41 pm on 19 March 2019.

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Photo of Darren Millar Darren Millar Conservative 1:41, 19 March 2019

One of the reasons that those figures are better, though, is because we've simply got patients stacked up in corridors rather than actually in cubicles being seen by medical professionals, and you will know that one of the regions that has the worst emergency department performances is north Wales, where we have the Betsi Cadwaladr health board in special measures for all sorts of performance-related problems, with Wrexham Maelor posting the worst figures in the whole of the United Kingdom, not just in Wales, and with the second-worst performing hospital being Glan Clwyd Hospital in Bodelwyddan.

And it's not just unscheduled care; it's also the planned care and operations as well. If you look back to December 2012, 87 per cent of patients received their treatment within the 26-week target time for orthopaedic surgery versus less than 60 per cent in December 2018. So, you're suggesting that things are getting better. The figures speak for themselves in terms of them getting worse and worse. When are patients in north Wales—when are my constituents—going to see this situation turned around, and when are those hospitals going to hit the targets that your Government sets for them?