I thank Helen, Dai and David for tabling this debate. As I've said many, many times before, nurses are the backbone of our NHS. Unfortunately, successive Governments have failed to recruit and retain enough nurses, and Wales has an abysmal record on workforce planning, and we are seeing the results, because there are more nurses leaving the profession than joining.

The fact that we needed to introduce legislation to ensure that wards have sufficient nurses on hospital wards to allow time to care is damning enough, but the fact that the law doesn't apply to all wards and all health settings is a travesty. The nurse staffing levels Act was introduced to improve patient safety. It is a fact that low nursing numbers can contribute up to a quarter more patient deaths.

Here in Wales, we spend nearly 12 per cent of our GVA on health, our health spending—second only to Scotland at £2,310 per person—is nearly £200 more per person than in England. Yet, we wait longer, and we have had to pass legislation to ensure that we have safe staffing levels, not because we don't invest enough in our NHS—half the Welsh budget is spent on health. And this legislation of safe staffing levels was introduced by an opposition AM, precisely because mismanagement had led to unsafe practices in hospitals across Wales. A lack of nationwide workforce planning and botched reorganisation has left the Welsh NHS in a state of disarray. Health organisations and clinicians have complained about the different approaches taken by local health boards. National policies get implemented in seven different ways, with patients facing an ever-increasing postcode lottery of healthcare.

We can see this clearly in how the nurse staffing levels Act is being implemented, because local health boards are all at differing levels of compliance with the Act. Betsi Cadwaladr states that compliance with the Act is high risk and not cost effective within its existing model. In my own region, Cwm Taf has no retention plan and, despite being ruled as compliant, wards at the Princess of Wales Hospital in Bridgend have staff shortages, which will impact upon patient safety. Swansea Bay has had 11 falls, resulting in serious harm or death, in which a failure to maintain staffing levels was considered to be a factor. This is simply not good enough.

Our constituents deserve and demand safe levels of staff in our hospitals. Welsh Government has to accept that the buck does stop with them. The nurse staffing levels Act has to be fully implemented in every health setting. We need a well-planned recruitment and retention strategy that makes nursing appealing to every person who wants to train as a nurse, in order to address the fact that nurses are leaving the profession in droves.

We have a safe staffing levels Act in place for a reason. We need safe staffing levels across all healthcare settings and not just on certain wards. How many more patients have to be seriously injured or lose their lives because of bad management and poor planning? So I urge colleagues to back this motion.