It's a pleasure to take part in this debate on the primary care model for Wales. I mean, I don't know if I've mentioned it before that I happen to be a GP myself, but—[Laughter.] Obviously, primary care is not just about GPs. Let me just put that out there for a moment. It's about practice nurses, it's about pharmacists, about district nurses, health visitors, dentists. Now, I count it a privilege to have been a GP for quite a long time now, and, obviously, 90 per cent of patient contacts are still at primary and community level, on only 7.6 per cent of the budget. Clusters, to be fair, are getting money. That money, though, to encourage even more the tremendous innovation that's going on, needs to be long term and in a proper strategy, rather than short-term pots that have to be bid for recurrently. So, to get a step change in the performance of clusters, they do need that long-term funding.

And individual GP practices need money in addition too. They are not getting any additional money now. It's all going to clusters. It is a system under pressure. It's overstretched, but despite that, some fantastic work is going on, and innovation. GPs see, on average, 60 patients per day, and that's not counting all the work that our practice nurses and district nurses and health visitors do as well. One recent Monday morning in the surgery in Gowerton, in my practice, we had 700 telephone calls from patients. Now, you have to have a way of dealing with 700 telephone calls, and that is triage. You are sifted to the best health professional to deal with your particular issue, which is not necessarily the GP. Certainly, in my case, for an awful lot of problems, it is not necessarily the GP. But that is an issue and it is a challenge for some people to get used to.

As hospital consultants have become more specialised over the years—they look at just bits of the body now—the concept of the consultant general physician has gone, and you wonder: who is the consultant general physician nowadays? Well, it's the GP. It's come from hospital. It's come to the community. So, you are asking now: who is doing the job of the traditional GP, then? Well, that's our practice nurse now. So, that shift has happened inexorably, but we would like to see some of that funding follow. All of those diabetic clinics and asthma clinics and so on that used to be in hospital are now carried by our nurse practitioners and practice nurse colleagues in primary care.