Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:03 pm on 16 July 2019.
Well, Llywydd, the Member makes a fundamental mistake, I believe, in interpreting reports of serious incidents as evidence that this means that everything is going wrong. For years in this Assembly, we've had this debate. I remember it very well over the save 1000 Lives campaign, launched nearly a decade ago, where we have consistently said that we want a culture in the Welsh NHS that, if you see something that has gone wrong, then you report it and you make sure that you learn from that experience. It does not mean at all that those incidents have done actual harm. It means that the risk of harm has been identified. And, in a learning culture, people are encouraged to come forward, report it and get that known among their colleagues.
If, every time those figures are published, we have people saying, 'Oh, this means that people are in danger in the Welsh NHS,' all we will do is to persuade people not to take that course of action—exactly the opposite of the sort of culture that I think, across many parts of this Assembly, we have worked to try to engender. The fact that some health boards are better at it and have persuaded more people to buy into that culture should be a matter of commendation for them, not a matter of trying to say that they are the worst in the bunch. I want an NHS where people are confident that, if there are things that they want to bring to attention, they will know that that is a valued and rewarded part of the work that they do, and then, when we get figures that demonstrate that, we should all be willing to say that that is evidence of a learning organisation determined to make things better, not evidence of an organisation that's always getting things wrong.