8. How does the Welsh Government plan to improve resilience in the health sector? OAQ54675

I thank the Member. Health boards, local authorities and the ambulance service have developed joint resilience plans for this winter. Final versions will be agreed this week. Managing peaks in pressure remains a challenge, but health and social care staff go on providing vital services every day.

Thank you for that answer, Minister. As you said, once again, our health professionals are gearing themselves up for the winter pressures. So, what steps have you taken to ensure that all areas of good practice identified over the years are embedded into the plans for this coming year?

I thank the Member for that important question. We have worked over many years to make sure that the lessons that are learnt in one part of Wales are spread to others, too. Funds that have been established over the last decade have always had that at the heart of them. It's why, on 1 October, when the Minister for Health and Social Services announced £30 million for winter resilience—announced earlier than ever before—£17 million of that has gone direct to the regional partnership boards, because learning the lessons in the health service, in a winter period, has to involve the social care services, as well as the health service. Now, up until now, the money has gone direct to the health service, and the health service makes the decisions. Now, £17 million will be jointly decided upon in those regional partnership boards, allowing the lessons that have been learnt over the recent past to be applied more widely across local authorities, and that there is learning between health boards as well.

Finally, Angela Burns.

Thank you, Presiding Officer. Of course, another way of building resilience is to look at the health service in the round. And you will know that, in west Wales, we have struggled to be able to deliver sustainable, resilient health services for the whole of west Wales. And there is a plan to perhaps build a new hospital, and there is continued uncertainty, of course, therefore, over the future of Glangwili and the future of Withybush. And I would like to know, First Minister, whether you are able to tell us whether or not the Welsh Government has in fact received any form of bid or inquiry from Hywel Dda University Health Board as to the potential of having funds going forward in order to move this forward. We have people who aren't coming to west Wales at the moment because the whole area is in a state of flux, and we need to know whether the ideas really have legs and possibility, or whether it is just a candle in the wind.

Well, Llywydd, I congratulate those clinicians in the Hywel Dda area who have led the conversation about the changing nature of demand and provision in that part of south-west Wales. And we look forward to receiving the next iteration of proposals from the health board, so that we can look for ways in which we will be able to support them in that endeavour. But the Member began by making, I thought, an important point—that the health service needs to be seen in the round, and that cannot mean a focus just on hospitals. For too long, the debate in south-west Wales has often been bedevilled by thinking that the health service equals a hospital. What we mean by 'in the round' is a reliance on the interface between primary care and secondary care, but also the interface between the health service and social care services. And some of the most imaginative proposals—thinking of Caroline Jones's question—and some of the most imaginative ways in which the money that we provide to primary care clusters in Wales have been found in Pembrokeshire, where use of that money in primary care, involving the third sector as well, seems to me a pretty good example of what we really ought to mean when we talk about a service 'in the round', rather than a service that is always focused just on one, and probably the most visible, part of what the health service does.

Thank you, First Minister.