Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:25 pm on 2 July 2019.
Well, Llywydd, here is the Welsh NHS, which, at the end of March, at the end of the annual cycle of reporting, had the lowest waiting times since 2013, fewer people waiting more than 26 weeks than for the last five years, a health service in which 30 per cent more people are treated within waiting times for cancer than they were five years ago, and where survival rates are better than ever before at one year and five years, a health service in which delayed transfers of care, in 2017 and 2018, were the two lowest years since those figures were ever collected. This is the health service that the Member wishes to describe as being in a dire state. It is simply not true. It simply does not reflect the state of the service that millions of people, year in and year out, get from the Welsh NHS. Caricaturing it in the way that the Member does does nothing to bring about the—[Interruption.]—nothing to bring about the improvements that we and she would wish to see. And those improvements that I have outlined are partly the result of the efforts that managers in the NHS make, as well as clinicians and others. We want a clear accountability system and we want to make sure that we have a system focused on quality. We already have one; we want to improve it further. That's why we're bringing forward legislation, and the legislation needs to be based on the facts of the health service in Wales, not a sort of general attempt to denigrate its reputation, where the evidence for that simply isn't available.