May I congratulate Helen Mary Jones for bringing this debate forward and for her wonderful opening remarks, which set out all the decisions that need to be taken? I also congratulate the Royal College of Nursing on this wonderful report on implementing the nurse staffing levels 2016. In terms of the progress made, there has been some progress made, as Helen said, but certain challenges remain. We had a debate last week on the health committee report on nursing and community nursing and many of those factors are also relevant here. May I also pay tribute to the cross-party group on nursing and midwifery, chaired by David Rees, which has led the way and led to the report published by the health committee that we discussed last week?

We all know of the challenges in our health service, particularly from the perspective of nurses. There aren't enough of them, first of all. There are vacant posts. We need to double the number of nurses undergoing training. We have a system that’s under pressure and our staff are under pressure. Our nurses are under pressure and are overworked and are often away from work because of the stresses and strains that they face. Of course, there are new demands, new medical developments, and we're asking more of our nurses, particularly in the community, who now deal with people in the community who used to be on hospital wards but now are treated at home.

We also need to safeguard whistleblowers who express concerns about the system. We're still not particularly effective at doing that, and as others have said, we need to be far more flexible with rotas and shift hours in order to ensure that nurses remain within our NHS. And, yes, we need to implement this legislation, the nurse staffing levels legislation. May I remind you why this was necessary in the first place? Well, because this legislation protects patients. The research has shown, as this report says, that poor staffing levels have led to an increase of up to 26 per cent in terms of wards where there are better staffing levels. So, not having enough nurses leads to people actually dying and an increase in the number of degree-level nurses relates to a reduction of 7 per cent in patient deaths. And, of course, naturally, we don't only need safe staffing levels in some wards, we need them in all health placements, in the community, in children wards, not just on the specialist wards that we have now.

But, specifically the nursing staff in Wales is facing a national crisis. There are high levels of vacancies, as I’ve already mentioned—at least 1,600 according to the RCN estimate in terms of vacant nursing posts—and there is also a dire shortage in the care home sector, as Angela Burns has already mentioned.

So, there is a significant challenge facing us and as this motion says, we need flexibility in the short term in order to retain staff. Yes, we can talk about training staff now and for the future, but we also need to retain the staff that we have on our wards and in the communities at the moment, and the Welsh Government, therefore, needs to set out how the NHS in Wales will increase opportunities to work flexibly as part of a national strategy to retain nurses, as Helen and Angela have already said, because there are many nurses in Wales who are responsible for other things in their lives and they need that flexibility as well as needing the job and the salary. They are responsible for young children, older parents, and they choose to work for an employer where they can manage their working hours. That’s why they go to work for private agencies, and so on and so forth, and, therefore, the health service also has to make the same kind of provision so that we can retain nurses in our national health service. Thank you.