Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:49 pm on 2 July 2019.
Llywydd, the health Minister was 100 per cent correct when he said that we will not set arbitrary targets. Why would we possibly do that? We set targets that we think make sense for the clinical benefit of patients, and if I had answered the Member in the winter, when he asked me questions about ambulances waiting at Morriston Hospital, by saying that this Government is not interested in short-term targets, I can imagine what he would have said about that. That’s the reason why the Welsh Government took a strong interest in the performance of the then Abertawe Bro Morgannwg health board over the winter. That’s why we were engaged on the telephone making sure that everything that could be done was being done, to make sure that there was flow through that hospital, that patients were able to be discharged out of ambulances into the A&E department, seen in a timely fashion, discharged home wherever possible. Those are proper targets. Those are targets that are not arbitrary. Those are targets that focus on the clinical needs of patients, and the Government will never step back from doing what we can do to assist health boards to discharge those targets and to help them to make sure that they are focused on meeting them for patients’ benefit.