Thank you, Presiding Officer, and to Members who have spoken in today's debate, which I'm happy to respond to. As everyone has recognised, poor eye health is a common problem that can have a devastating impact on people and their families. And, as we recognise, the number of people in Wales living with sight loss is predicted to double by 2050. So, given the importance of eye healthcare, I do welcome the opportunity to set out the changes that we are making to improve services for people using them now and to ensure that they're sustainable and equipped to respond to future demand.

There are people in Wales who are still waiting too long for their initial treatment, and I recognise that is not good enough. However, despite increases in the number of people needing our services, we have seen significant improvements in referral-to-treatment times over recent years. At the end of March 2019, there were 218 people waiting longer than 36 weeks for their first appointment, and that's the best position since March 2012, and a 93 per cent improvement since the low point of March 2015, when over 3,500 people were in that position. But, importantly—and this is the reason for the new measures—we know that referral-to-treatment time measures only apply to new patients. Most ophthalmology patients need regular, ongoing review and treatment to ensure improved sight or to reduce the risk of avoidable sight loss, and clinical evidence suggests that approximately 10 per cent of new patients are at risk of irreversible sight loss compared to 90 per cent of follow-up patients.

Again, I take on board the points that Jenny Rathbone has helpfully made about the way we are trying to reconfigure our system to make better use of the professionals who exist on our high street, where people can be safely and appropriately managed outside of a consultant-led service in a hospital. But the figures that we've quoted and discussed in this debate are stark. Healthcare professionals and the third sector raised concerns that referral-to-treatment time measures did not reflect the things that were most important. And, interestingly, there has been lots of conversation about cataracts, and part of our challenge, of course, is that, if we want to improve old referral-to-treatment time measures, because you're on a waiting list initially for cataracts and yet actually it's clinically safer to wait with a cataract than with other conditions—. That doesn't mean to say you can wait forever, but our previous measures were driving us towards meeting a target without properly considering clinical need.

So, the old measures didn't capture delays later in the patient pathway and, as I say, could drive services to prioritise appointments for new patients. As a result, I listened to what was said by both clinicians and the third sector, and patient representatives in particular, and we've set out on piloting a new way of understanding what new measures could look like and how they could be designed. And, at the end of that process, I've introduced the new measures that I've recently announced. It's been devised to account for both new and existing patients, based on clinical need and a risk of adverse outcome. And the work has been fully supported by the vision cross-party group, and I do recognise and welcome their support.

And this has been a bold move for us because what we've essentially done as a Government is we've set out the areas where we need to do more in a much more honest way, because we could, frankly, have left the old measures and said, 'We're meeting our referral-to-treatment targets', and we could have essentially not been able to properly expose the nature of the challenge. And we are the first UK nation to do this. We regularly talk about: are measures comparable between UK nations? Well, they're not, because we made a deliberate choice to change our measures, and I believe it's not just clinically appropriate because of the advice I've had, but actually I believe that people in Wales should get a better service because of the drive to meet those new targets that we've introduced.

I'll take the intervention, then I should make some progress.