Part of 3. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:33 pm on 12 November 2019.
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.