Part of 3. Topical Questions – in the Senedd at 3:27 pm on 29 January 2020.
Well, I think it's important to set out that the safety of the service is the first priority for the people who work in, run and deliver, and have responsibility for the service—from myself to the chief executive, to the medical director, to front-line staff. And the paper that the board will be considering tomorrow, in the name of the medical director, sets out the risks that exist, and that, actually, the risk is that there is much greater risk in terms of safety and the quality of the service in continuing to try to run a service without any substantive consultants in place.
And in terms of the numbers of consultants and where they currently are—people make choices about where they work, and we can't actually force people to move between one department or the other. It's not a question of the health board refusing to try to recruit to the Royal Glamorgan. It's not a question of there being plenty of doctors who are prepared to work. Actually, the challenge is about the number of staff we have, and the emergency department consultants themselves have the ability to move jobs in different parts of Wales and beyond, and, as we've seen in other parts of the UK, people do make those active choices. The challenge is: are we prepared to run our health service on the basis that safety and quality are the primary considerations, or do we place a different premium on the locality of services?
And in terms of the examples you gave where people would say that their lives could be lost—that's the sort of language that people understandably use when people are concerned, but I don't think it necessarily leads to a rational debate, because if someone is really at risk of losing their life, then they should be under blue-light conditions to go into the most appropriate point for their care, however near or far that is, and whether that's in a helicopter or on the ground.
Our challenge is how we have a regular pattern of services that is sustainable, genuinely safe and will last into the future and will recruit staff into it. And in the four options that are in the public domain in the executive medical director's report, it sets out two options that the medical director says are not viable and not sustainable. It sets out the challenges that existed at the time the south Wales programme was agreed—[Inaudible.]—got worse, and it sets out two options that they recommend that the board considers to properly engage with the public and wider stakeholders, including elected representatives. That's my expectation for the health board: to take seriously their responsibilities, not to duck the challenges that have a real impact on patient safety, to engage properly with the public and wider stakeholders about what each of those things mean, and what you will actually get in terms of where services are, and the quality that each one of us would expect for ourselves and our own families.