Group 1: Duty to secure quality in health services — workforce planning and appropriate staffing levels (Amendments 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34)

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:24 pm on 10 March 2020.

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Photo of Angela Burns Angela Burns Conservative 5:24, 10 March 2020

Diolch, Llywydd. I guess your answer's no real surprise, Minister, to any of us who believe really passionately that, to have a duty of quality, you need to have the right staff in the right place at the right time. And I think to those of us who've seen over the last few years again and again the instances where there haven't been enough staff and they haven't been in the right place and they haven't been at right time, and it has led to some very, very sad and demoralising situations within the NHS—.

That initial legislation, when it first came in, as introduced by your Cabinet colleague Kirsty Williams, was groundbreaking. But we've done nothing to build on it, and we've done nothing to really take it forward. Now this supports a recommendation in the health committee. This was a recommendation where we took an awful lot of witness evidence. This is what the specialists are saying. This isn't just Angela Burns, Welsh Conservative, or Rhun ap Iorwerth, Plaid Cymru, or Caroline Jones, Brexit Party, just trying to be difficult and invent something. This is actually as a result of really considered evidence by the specialists. And if you ever say it once when you stand up in this Chamber, you say it many, many times: 'We must listen to the clinicians. We must listen to the professionals.' We did. We did, hence these amendments.

I've never been one for legislation lite—I do believe, if you do legislation, you have to do it really well, so it has a really effective part. And the whole point of this Bill is about quality and about candour and about patient representation. And I fail to understand how you can possibly hope to deliver that level of quality if there are chances that you do not have the right staff, whatever they are, in the right place at the right time.

And I will just add one last thing, which is you make the comment that health boards are already supposed to be doing this. Well, we know that they're not, so I would like to move these amendments tabled in my name.