Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:57 pm on 2 April 2019.
Well, Llywydd, it is absolutely the policy of this Government to strengthen local provision of services and to bring services closer to people. It is no surprise to anybody, nearly a decade into austerity, that public services feel the stresses and strains. And, of course, confidence levels in the Welsh NHS are significantly above where his party is in charge of the health service, in England. And those figures are particularly true when it comes to primary care. So he's quite wrong to suggest that the services that GPs provide are not appreciated by their patients; we know that they are every day.
But, we also know that our GP community has to do more to match the expectations of patient populations as far as access is concerned. And we also know that the way in which individual GP practices organise access varies very considerably and that there are some practices that are a good deal more successful in finding systems that allow them to meet that demand than others. That's the standards work that the health Minister published only a week or so ago. It says to our GP community that, in exchange for the very substantial investment we make in primary care and want to go on making in primary care, we expect, and patients have a right to expect, that there will be a set of common standards—that if you rely on the telephone to contact your GP practice, that telephone will be answered in a timely fashion, that if you expect to have a service through the medium of Welsh as well as in English, that you have a proper expectation that that service will be provided bilingually, and a set of other measures that were set out in Vaughan Gething's statement. We want to work with the GP community to secure those standards, because in that way, the very high levels of satisfaction that patients have in Wales with those services will go on being secured.