Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 3 March 2020.
I thank the leader of the opposition for those questions. On spread, there is clear advice available to patients in Wales and, as of today, any patient needing advice will be able to use the 111 number to get coronavirus advice at no charge to that individual. The advice is, if you think you have any vulnerability, not to go to the GP, not to go to an accident and emergency department, but to take advice through that number in the first instance.
In relation to the one individual who has been identified in Wales, of course Public Health Wales has immediately set about contact tracing, as it's called, to make sure that anybody who might have come into contact with that individual and therefore be additionally exposed to risk is known, that they're tested, and that they can receive the reassurance that they need.
Paul Davies makes a very important point about primary care. Should coronavirus move into a phase where delay and mitigation, as the plan suggests, become the primary response, then primary care will be in the front line to try and mitigate the need for hospitalisation. Yesterday the health Minister, myself and the chief medical officer talked about ways in which we might be able to remove some of the requirements that primary care currently operates within. So, often, as a result of debates here on this Assembly floor, GPs carry out routine monitoring on many conditions—diabetes, for example—where people are called in, monitored and so on. It may be that, if this becomes a more urgent situation, we may have to suspend some of that more routine work that GPs currently undertake in order to release their time to be able to respond to more urgent needs. As Paul Davies suggested, that has a budgetary consequence, because GPs are paid on the basis of carrying out that sort of activity. That's the nature of the contract that we have with them, so we would have to be able to make sure that our GPs know that, by not doing things that we currently expect of them to free up their time for more urgent stuff, they wouldn't be financially disadvantaged as a result, and there's flexibility in our budgets to make sure that we can do that.