The Health Service

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:57 pm on 11 February 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:57, 11 February 2020

Well, Llywydd, what the figures quoted by Leanne Wood demonstrate is that this is a mobile workforce in a shortage profession where people who are able to be A&E consultants themselves make decisions about where they go to work. Nobody, neither she nor I, is in a position to direct people to take up jobs. People apply and they decide. As you have seen, people do that. That's just the nature of the way that people are recruited in a shortage profession. [Interruption.]

It would help a lot, I think, if Members were willing to listen to the answer rather than shouting across it all the time. That's three Members on the Plaid Cymru benches who have tried to interrupt me in this one answer.

So, there's a mobile workforce and people go to jobs that they decide to apply for. The south Wales programme to which Leanne Wood referred was a massive clinically led programme that had buy-in from health boards and clinicians right across south Wales. It was not a programme led by the Government; it was a programme led by doctors and clinicians in the health service. And the answer, in the position of the Royal Glamorgan Hospital, at the end is—when clinicians have had the advice they need, when they've answered the questions that they need to answer—that that is a decision that is best made by doctors and not a decision made by politicians.