7. Plaid Cymru Debate: NHS Performance

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:14 pm on 29 January 2020.

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Photo of Angela Burns Angela Burns Conservative 5:14, 29 January 2020

And I won't bother to address your intervention because I'm sure you can talk about it in your bit. I do want to address, though, amendments 3 and 4 because, actually, let me be really clear: the reason why we've changed those amendments is because we think that too often there is an artificial barrier between health and social care, and in the same way that there's an artificial barrier between health of the physical variety and mental health. Now, Rhun ap Iorwerth, you've sat with me on many a committee when we talked about the totality of well-being and the integration of the human. We believe that the whole of our health service needs to just shift focus and look at people when they go into hospital, when they go into primary care, when they access social services in a holistic way, because one of the big areas where we lose money and we do not deliver is we just fix a thing without looking at the whole person, their social care needs, their housing needs, their physical needs, their mental health needs, and putting them back together so they can go back out into society and live whatever is left of their lives as well as they possibly can. And that's our intention there, to put more money—we already take in health and social care £8 billion, and Wales needs money in other areas. So, that £8 billion needs to be redeployed in a much more clever and authentic way where we look at that whole person, and that's the change we're trying to drive through with amendments 3 and 4.

I'm really sorry, I know that I've run out of time, but I did want to just quickly add in that we're talking about recruitment due to financial pressures because we do think that there's a massive recruitment pressure, not just with doctors and nurses, but we forget about the backroom staff. We always talk about the front line, but if you're a consultant and you've got to send a load of results out to somebody and you haven't got a secretary who can type up that letter to get it out to that person and call them back in for further treatment, it's a massive problem. I'll leave it there, I do appreciate I've run out of time. Thank you very much for your additional moments, but I do commend our amendments to the Chamber.