It's a fair point that Joyce Watson makes about the reality of wanting to recruit staff and people working in both domiciliary and residential care, and we do rely on a range of people from outside the UK to do so. So, any barriers to recruiting those people, who are often under the Government's proposed immigration cap, is a real problem for all of us in every one of the UK nations. If we were having this conversation in England, Scotland or Northern Ireland you'd find providers and elected members expressing exactly the same concerns about the practical impact on health and care services. 

In terms of what we are in control of and what we can do, I'm happy to confirm to Joyce Watson that people who have had their operations postponed by the health service will be informed of a prompt early date for that operation to be re-arranged. The operations haven't been cancelled and moved to the back of the queue. It's part of what we do when the health service does say that it needs to put off an operation; they will automatically be offered a new and a prompt date. And, of course, I want to highlight, as the health board has done, that I'm really sorry and I understand the impact upon individuals who have been looking forward, often with a degree of anxiety, to a surgery, to then have that put off. That is not a pleasant position to go through, and yet we also know that objectively the people that are having emergency care and having cancer surgery—if we were not prioritising those people we would rightly be criticised for failing to do so across the system. 

On the challenges and the potential answer that Phil Banfield has suggested—he said is a possible answer—more beds is often a seductive answer. We have surge capacity, so, as I've said earlier, 400 extra beds right across the health and care system—beds or bed equivalents. The challenge is that if we want to permanently increase capacity we need to understand what that's for, how we staff that so we have the permanent staff to be able to do so, and yet, actually, when the Royal College of Emergency Medicine talk about what they want to see to release what they refer to as exit block, they are not just talking about more consultants—and everybody typically asks for more of their own members—but they're saying they want to see investment in social care and in the social care system, because they recognise this isn't just a problem at the front door of the acute system in our hospitals, it's a challenge about people being kept at home safely, but also about being able to go to their own homes with a package of care and support. You'll have seen in the draft budget that, yet again this year, the health budget has put a deliberate sum of money into social care. I've increased that sum of money within the budget. It's also about why we put money into regional partnership boards that require health and social care to work together with other partners, and that is the system reform we need to see continuing at pace to try to make sure that we can deal with these problems as effectively and as quickly as possible, because they're not going to disappear.