Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:50 pm on 2 April 2019.
Unlike the glass-half-empty position of Darren Millar, I very much welcome the Minister's statement, because I think it gives a clear direction to the workforce plan underpinning 'A Healthier Wales', and I think that's really important. So, thank you very much for your statement. I think you're to be congratulated that we've managed to attract more and more doctors, year on year, to come and train and live in Wales, and that's absolutely as it needs to be. It takes a bit of time to fill the places, and, if we haven't taken on more people, it's because we have to ensure that the candidates we are going to invest in training with are above the line in terms of competencies, otherwise we'd be wasting the investment.
I just wanted to ask you about the specific issues raised by the endometriosis march that I went on on Saturday, because endometriosis affects one in 10 women—it is not a rare disease, sadly—and it's little known about, beyond the immediate families of those who suffer from it. Once you've got it, from about the age of 12, it unfortunately is a chronic and lifelong condition. As a result of people generally not knowing about it, I feel it isn't appropriately resourced, neither in primary care nor in secondary care, because too many people on the march were talking about how it had taken years to get themselves appropriately diagnosed, because their GP simply hadn't thought about endometriosis when they went to the doctor with pelvic pain or other related issues. So, it seems to me that, in this training, we need to ensure that people do know about endometriosis and that, in secondary care, there needs to be at least one member of the gynaecological team who is specialising in endometriosis.
And, in terms of the nursing staff needed, we have an excellent specialist team based in Cardiff and the Vale who provide an excellent service, both at secondary and tertiary level, for people with endometriosis, with a team of three or four surgeons and consultants and just one endometriosis nurse, and she is on the verge of retirement. So, we need to ensure that those who have these excellent skills are able to train up appropriate people to carry on the excellent work. And we clearly need more than one endometriosis nurse for the whole of Wales, if we're talking about one in 10 women. So, I wondered if you could tell me how this work plan is going to ensure that we have appropriately trained people to deal with the sorts of diseases like this that aren't the ones that everybody talks about, like cancer.