I want to introduce this Chamber to a constituent of mine, Mr Heddwyn Hughes. I first met Heddwyn and his family a good number of years ago, when they were experiencing some difficulties with the funding of his care placement in Mynyddygarreg and they came to me for some support and advice. I would have been perfectly happy just to talk to the family, but the family said to me, 'Heddwyn is your constituent, as well as us. Come and see him. Come and meet him.' And I was very pleased and proud to do so. He was a gentleman with severe learning disabilities that he'd had from birth. He'd been in care from the age of nine in a range of homes, but he was surrounded by a loving family and living in the community where he belonged.

We successfully resolved the funding issue, and Heddwyn continued to be funded by the local health board, as was appropriate, and I hadn't heard from his family for a very long time until this week. I couldn't instantly remember the case when I saw the e-mail, and when I opened the attachment and saw Heddwyn's smile, then I remembered who it was.

Heddwyn died in May 2015 in a care home run by the local health board. The jury at his inquest could not determine the cause of his injury, though he died having had a broken neck. But his inquest concluded that he did not receive appropriate care and treatment by the medical staff in his care home, that they did not respond appropriately to his presentation—he was a gentlemen who was physically able to move before the injury; suddenly, he could not move from the neck down. Now, if that happened to somebody who was neurotypical—if it happened to one of us—you would instantly call an ambulance. The staff decided not to do that in this case, they gave inappropriate information to the GP when the GP arrived, and the GP struggled to diagnose his condition. Eventually, he was sent to hospital with complete loss of use of all his limbs. But the hospital did not diagnose his broken neck for 10 days. And the reason given for that was, 'He couldn't tell us what had happened.' Of course he couldn't tell them what had happened—he wasn't able to communicate verbally.

There's a whole lot else that I could say about this case. But the family came back to me on this issue because they believe that the healthcare staff were doing their best, that they hadn't had the appropriate training to understand his needs, to understand his communication needs, and that they weren't able to provide the care that he needed because they did not know how—not because they didn't wish to, not because they didn't care, not because they weren't good people, but because they did not know how.

The family asked me—. They were here today and they asked me specifically to raise his case here as an example of a gentleman who had many years of life ahead of him, whose broken neck could have been treated and he could have continued to live a full life, even though he may have had a physical disability as a result of it. They lost him eventually to pneumonia, because he was not treated for a broken neck for 10 days.

I want to associate myself with everything that has been said in this Chamber today about this being an issue of equality, of people's right to treatment. Heddwyn was my constituent. His family are my constituents. He was a gentleman loved in his community, who had a full life. He lost that life because the staff did not know how to care for him. This is intolerable in twenty-first century Wales. And we will not solve this issue by sitting staff in front of a computer for 25 minutes—we will not. Effective equalities training—and many of you know that I worked in this field in the past—has to be achieved both by learning the law and learning the guidance and learning the appropriate thing to do, and then by having our own preconceptions, our own ways of thinking, challenged.

I know there are complications, as Mark Isherwood said, about mandating training, but I can't imagine that there would be any member of healthcare staff in this country of ours who would not want to receive that training if they were given protected time to do it. So, please, I really hope—and I'm very grateful to the Petitions Committee for bringing this to us today—please, please, for Heddwyn, for everybody else that we've heard about today, please let us have our staff properly trained so that our fellow citizens will not be put in this position again. Heddwyn and his family, all the families affected by this, deserve to be taken seriously, and our staff need and deserve the training that they need to protect and support patients like Heddwyn.