Thank you for the comments and the questions. I'll deal with your final point, actually, because it follows on from some of the conversations we had earlier more generally about our whole system, because the lost hours are an impact upon the staff and the patient, they're an impact on the community, because the risk that is being managed if an ambulance is held up at a hospital site means that a potential risk in the community where that paramedic crew could be going is not being managed, but it's also about there are people in the wrong place waiting in emergency departments who aren't able to go into beds if they need to go into beds or to be able to be discharged. And so we have a number of medically fit people at any one time in each of our major hospitals, and that's why I focus on health and social care, going back to the part of the point of having a parliamentary review that covers health and social care. In the recent round of meetings that I'm undertaking with health and local government partners there's been a real focus on delayed transfers. But, on that point, the front door of a hospital is only part of the system, and, actually, without the link with social care, we won't see the flow that we need, and so the very understandable frustrations that staff have, whether they're in an emergency department or an ambulance, and that patients themselves have—it's not going to be realised.

Now, we have seen progress. So, our delayed transfers of care have moved on positively and they're still at historical lows, which is a good contrast with the position in England, but the progress we've made since the introduction of the new model in ambulance services has stalled, and I want to see further progress made on lost hours, but that won't happen unless there's a focus on the whole system, because otherwise we'll simply shift the problem from one part to another, and, if we build extra capacity into one part of that system without actually understanding the flow through it, we'll simply clog people up in a different part of the system. So, it is part of the reason why I've taken the time not just, a year on from 'A Healthier Wales', to go and review more general progress, but I want to look again at the health of the whole system, because otherwise we won't answer the problem properly in a way that is properly sustainable.

On your point about staff, actually, there has been progress made on sickness absence within the health board; there's been a reduction over the last six months in sickness absence rates—within the ambulance trust, rather. The challenge, though, is to make sure that that is sustained, because the ambulance service has the highest sickness absence rates of any part of the NHS family, as you know and as you've regularly pointed out from time to time. It's partly about mental health and stress-related absences. It's also about musculoskeletal absence, as one of the two largest parts of that. We've made some progress within the ambulance service in reducing mental health-related absences, but we haven't seen the sort of reduction we want to on musculoskeletal-related absences. So, that does help us to know that the employer knows the area that it needs to go at to see further improvement, because there's been an improvement of more than a percentage in terms of the absence rate, but it is still at a significantly higher rate than the NHS Wales average. 

On your point about stroke care—and, again, it's part of the system, not the whole story, and I think it's fair the way that you put the question about the clinical pathways. They're not just about what happens when someone is delivered by a paramedic crew to a part of the hospital system; it is about what happens through the whole part of our system. So, the staff audits that I take a regular interest in tell us about whether people are admitted to the right part of our system, how quickly they're seen when they're there, but also then the focus we'll need to have on revising some of those measures about how quickly people receive rehabilitation. That's a key part of living through and living well after a stroke as well.

And, in the statement, I have committed to both develop measures and to report on them publicly to understand that the ambulance part of that equation is doing its job properly, and that will then feed into the wider staff audit that we publish in association with the Royal College of Physicians to tell us about the care being delivered within our hospital setting and, crucially, the further investment that I'm sure we need to make in rehabilitation services as well.