Our approach promotes seamless working between partners at community level, through our primary care clusters, providing a health and well-being system focused on the needs of their local population. Our clusters bring together  the health board, the local authorities and community-based services to improve health and well-being together, not just a service focused on the NHS. And that is a significant change to previous ways of working. It requires practices to work together and with the wider community of service providers to make the best use of resources, and provide that joined-up care around the needs of people and communities.

We've seen that our ideas have gained interest from others. It may interest Members to know that the 10-year plan for NHS England published in January adopts something suspiciously similar to our cluster-based approach, but I see no credit given for the original ideas taken and advanced here in Wales. If you talk to people delivering primary care across the border in England, they recognise they have taken inspiration from what we are doing here in Wales, and that should be the positive part of devolution as we celebrate 20 years—to celebrate what we are doing and taking a lead on, to look at where other parts of the UK are taking it up, and, equally, to be open-minded about improvements that we could make here, learning from other parts of the UK.

So, cluster working continues to evolve here in Wales. When this Assembly debated clusters in January last year, I explained that our approach had been careful to avoid being overly prescriptive. So, our model in Wales is drawn on innovative practice, designed locally and agreed nationally by all stakeholders on our primary care board, bringing together people from pharmacy, from social care backgrounds and, of course, from general practice as well. And it's that range of stakeholders that have agreed on a new way forward. So, we're using our programme of reform of primary care contracts to support community pharmacists to be members of clusters, and for more general medical services to be planned and delivered at a cluster level. And I look forward to providing Assembly Members with a report on progress on wider contract reform across primary care this autumn.

Now, the Welsh Government continues to provide £10 million annually directly to clusters to make their own choices about what to invest in in their local healthcare needs. I expect in the future that more decisions will be made at cluster level. I have made clear many times that I expect scale and pace in all parts of Wales, in both adopting and adapting a transformative approach to primary care. To help continue to drive this, I will set national delivery milestones to transform and improve local healthcare, to hold to account the leaderships within our different health partners.

In March I launched the Welsh Government's new national standards for access to general medical services, and this, of course, is a key concern from the national survey for Wales when it comes to primary care. I visited Taff's Well Medical Centre when I launched those standards, and I was pleased to see, first-hand, the excellent access to their services for their patients. It has been running large parts of the primary care model for several years, and the wait time for a routine appointment in that practice is one to two days. That is our aspiration to be delivered right across the country. 

In March I also announced the creation of an all-Wales locum register. This provides a much-needed way to manage and understand arrangements for locum GPs—a key concern of partners in general practice. And I'm happy to confirm that, already, since the launch, we now have 508 locums taking part in this register, and more expressing their interest in taking part. We have just launched the pharmacy phase of the 'Train. Work. Live.' campaign and we will extend the 'Train. Work. Live.' campaign to allied health professions to help deliver on our ongoing commitment to support multiprofessional teamworking within and for our communities. Core to our approach in Wales is the principle of services planned and delivered across the 24/7 period. Now, that naturally includes a transformation of out-of-hours services and the roll-out of the 111 service, and I know that public accounts have taken an interest in that part of our services—again, a significant step forward and a difference to the way that those services were delivered in the past.

Other examples of our priorities in the strategic programme for primary care include a national system to identify people at increased risk of unscheduled care; a system for monitoring escalating pressures on our services; peer review for the urgent care from a community-based health and social care service perspective; a new template for cluster plans to move forward; national support for conversations with our public about how local services are changing and, crucially, why. We will evaluate and report publicly on the impact of the new primary care model in all parts of Wales. The aim is to have a better job for our staff to do and, crucially, a better service with and for the public. The national primary care board is expected to ratify detailed action plans underpinning our approach later this week.

That does mean that, together with that national leadership, local leadership and innovation are vital for transformation. More and more general practices are developing multiprofessional teams, introducing systems to signpost people to local services and triage people with clinical needs, so they see the right person at the right time, the first time. More and more GP practices are embracing the role of non-clinical well-being services. For example, a general practice in Wrexham is collaborating with community services for people who are homeless, and I've been to a GP practice in Cardiff that has developed a community garden—the dual benefit there of improving community unity and helping people to address problems such as loneliness, isolation, anxiety and stress. And as we heard earlier on in questions, there is lots of activity taking place in community pharmacy. Community pharmacies now offer a treatment for a range of common ailments without the need for a prescription—again, innovation taking place here first in Wales. Pharmacists continue to train to prescribed medication as well as to dispense and advise.

The 'A Healthier Wales' transformation fund that I created is, of course, trialling new, larger scale models of care and support. For example, the Cwm Tawe cluster is improving population health and well-being by strengthening self-care and building community resilience. Across the Aneurin Bevan health board area, integrated community-based health and social care teams are transforming into a 24/7 hospital discharge scheme. People are able to get home faster with the right package of care and in the right place for them. North Wales is implementing plans for co-ordinated community services designed around the principle that we discussed earlier of what matters with and for and to the citizen, who should be at the centre of our service redesign.

Now, time is short, so I can't set out every single action that we're taking to transform primary care services in Wales. However, the approach I have set out is fundamental to delivering our vision in 'A Healthier Wales' and the long-term future for health, care and well-being outcomes for the people that we all represent. I look forward to hearing Members' contributions towards today's debate.