10. Plaid Cymru Debate: Access to Health Services

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:54 pm on 6 November 2019.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of Helen Mary Jones Helen Mary Jones Plaid Cymru 4:54, 6 November 2019

Thank you very much, Deputy Presiding Officer. We want to focus in this debate—I'm pleased to move the motion, tabled in the name of Rhun ap Iorwerth—we want to focus in this debate on access to community care services, community health services.

Now, I don't feel I have to spend terribly long in this Chamber setting out the fact that we have a real problem. The number of GPs, for example, has fallen since 2010 from 1,991 to 1,964 at a time when demand has gone up. We know that when it comes to access to the dentistry service—and I know my colleague Siân Gwenllian will have more to say to this later in the debate—only one in six dentists in Wales are taking on new national health patients at the moment.

When the health committee recently reported on community nursing, we were shocked to discover that we, in fact, don't know how many district nurses we've got. We don't know what the state of community nursing is in Wales, because the data isn't there. And we all know, in this Chamber, from our constituency and regional postbags, and many of us from our personal experience, of people waiting weeks and weeks to see a GP or to access other services in community services and GP surgeries for non-urgent appointments. And we also know that there are huge disparities in services across Wales, and that poorer communities are disproportionately badly served—