6. Minister, will you outline what plans the Welsh Government has to improve cancer diagnosis? OAQ54907

This approach is set out in the cancer delivery plan, which remains in place until December of this year. This includes the pilots on rapid diagnostic centres we discussed earlier, supporting primary care referral practice and the single cancer pathway. There are also important national programmes in place to support diagnostic services, such as imaging, pathology and endoscopy.

Thank you for that and, of course, I heard the response you gave to the Member for Arfon when she raised a very similar question earlier on, but I just want to talk about gaps in the diagnostic workforce. And if I was to take an example, such as histopathologists, since the new junior doctor contract was introduced in England in 2016, a significant difference between the pay given to trainees studying histopathology in Wales and those across the border in England has developed, meaning that if you're a histopathologist working in England, you'll earn an extra £60,000 over the course of your career compared to a counterpart in Wales. And there is a really strong view from stakeholders that this is contributing, in part—it's not all of it, but it's contributing—to the 40 per cent drop-out rate of trainees from the Welsh training programme since 2017. Forty per cent. That's a shockingly high number. So, given these problems facing the workforce and given that they'll continue to have a severe impact, ultimately, on the patients and on our ability to do an early diagnosis of cancer and therefore improve people's quality of life, can you please outline what your Government is doing to resolve this problem and also provide a time frame as to when any action would take place?

Well, actually, the good news is that we've filled all of our histopathology training places this year, but I'm aware of not just the role that histopathologists have within cancer but more broadly as well, and there is the point about retaining those people during the course of their training and afterwards as well. And it is, as I said in discussion earlier with Mark Reckless, only partly about the pay. It is also about the broader conditions of service and the direction of travel that we have as well. And as we get into having a fully fledged health and social care workforce strategy, we'll have a strategic plan for that to hang around as well. But we are already taking action. As you've seen, we're obviously increasing places, there's the extra priority and, like I said, it is encouraging, of course, that we filled all of those places this year. But it is a matter that's constantly kept under review because, as we want to expand and more successfully deliver the single cancer pathway, we'll need to look again at the workforce we have and the workforce that we need.