Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:31 pm on 15 October 2019.
Thank you for those questions. Certainly, on your final point about how we plan for the future, that's part of the reason we created Health Education and Improvement Wales. It's a strategic body to help forecast workforce need and to come up with that national workforce plan that I referred to earlier. And the way that they're working jointly with Social Care Wales—. Because every time we have a challenge on service pressures in this Chamber, we talk regularly about the staff and the staff that we need, and there's mixed acknowledgement of the fact that we can't always simply recruit staff, certainly within the UK, to cover all of those gaps. It's partly about planning for our future workforce, understanding where and how we'll be able to recruit from within the UK, from within Europe and the challenges that Brexit may deliver, and the wider world as well.
That goes alongside our planning on increasing our training places. In the last two years, I've approved, even in very difficult times, real increases in the training of healthcare professionals, and we heard earlier today about the increased number of GP training places and others as well. And that goes on to the second point about the challenges of where health boards act individually but where we've understood that we need to act nationally to deliver the greatest returns. So our 'Train. Work. Live.' campaign has been a good example of having a national approach that health boards have all bought into—not just the common branding and not just the common messaging, but actually how we go about doing that, having a national single point of access for a range of those areas, and it's been successful, in particular in terms of GP recruitment. We've also launched—[Inaudible.]—midwifery to follow nursing and other healthcare professionals as well. So, we are learning from where we've been successful with that campaign recently and, equally, where we know there's still more for us to do.
On your point about integrating planning across the health service and with other services, your point in particular about ambulances and the challenges, this is a whole-system issue—both people who do or don't need to be in an ambulance. Once they're at the front door of an emergency department, it's very difficult for them to be released. Ambulances are held there and waiting too long, and what does that means for people who are medically fit within the hospital, wherever it is, who could and should be released and helped to get back to their own homes? That's partly within the gift of the health service. Not every single medically fit person is waiting for social care, but we do recognise it is, in significant part, about the partnership between healthcare and social care to make sure that people are having the same conversation and a more integrated approach. That underpins our transformation fund and approach, of course, as well.
And I think that goes into the point that you made about future challenges. Well, we already have future challenges that are here today. Telecare and technology-enabled care aren't really about the way to deliver healthcare in the future—they're already happening today. Our challenge is how we take advantage of them to deliver much more consistently across the country. They're not just for rural parts of the country, they're for every single part of the country to improve access and experience. And we're already considering, for example, how precision medicine will change the way we'll need to plan for the service. We may well have expensive new medicines, as we're enabled to have into our system in the new treatment fund, but we could have expensive new medicines of a much more significant initial cost that could be genuinely curative, though, and that would be a very different conversation to have about front-loading the investment you make to actually have a curative impact in any event.
I recognise your point about the 111 roll-out, but I do need to just come back and say we didn't roll 111 out at the same time as they did in England. They took a very rapid national approach, and they had lots and lots of problems within England as a result—very different models, and it was a really big problem in large parts of the healthcare system for staff and the public. We deliberately took more time to understand the model that we want, and the reason it isn't being rolled out at breakneck speed across the health service is because we've taken seriously the ability to get the right staff in the right place at the right time to deliver the right service, because, otherwise, we would simply repeat the mistakes that were made in England, and I'm not prepared to do that.
So, finally, we certainly do take a long-term perspective. Of course, we have a long-term plan in Wales—it's called 'A Healthier Wales'. It's a joint plan across health and social care, and planning more effectively will allow us to deliver the vision that I set out before you more than a year ago.