Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:04 pm on 10 March 2020.
Thank you, Presiding Officer. I've been an Assembly Member for about 10 years now, and I've sat on a whole variety of committees—finance, health, education, children and young people, as it was—and all the time we talk about 'How do we know?' How do we know that we're performing well? How do we know that we're meeting our targets? How do we know we're delivering the outcomes for the money that we're spending? This amendment, amendment 38, which I formally move, is about getting the data so we have the information so we can make the planning.
It is an amendment that was based on a suggestion by the Royal College of Surgeons in their written evidence to the committee, but it actually runs true throughout the whole of the objective of this Bill. We want to know how well our surgical outcomes data is doing at a unit level. Again, I want to remind Members of another exciting fact: how many times have any of you—and maybe not you, but I'm sure Members of Plaid Cymru and I'm sure Members of the Brexit Party, I know Members of my party and I'm sure some of the independent Members will have put in freedom of information requests to try to drill down to get that information to find out what happened: where; when; how? How many things have been achieved; how many operations have happened; what type of operations; where are the blockages? Because by knowing what is going on, by having that data, you can actually start to have good governance. You can go back, you can challenge and you can scrutinise. This amendment is all about getting good data.
I listened, Minister, to your response at Stage 2. You were very concerned about a prescriptive list of information, and I took that on board. As a result, the amendment here at Stage 3 is broader and it's also with an inclusion that the data is shared with Ministers and Public Health Wales to help inform your future work and planning. This is about helping you and helping your NHS teams to perform better, to do a better job, to know what is going on.
I was very disappointed by your response to the Chair of the Health, Social Care and Sport Committee. It's not good enough to list off the current indicators by which health boards must measure their performance. I do note the work surrounding the Once for Wales concern management system on the recording of incidents, complaints and adverse outcomes in healthcare, as well as the aim to develop a single framework for measurement and benchmarking of quality-related data under the five-year quality and safety plan, but I don't think these are yet sufficient to properly analyse patient outcomes. I think it would be prescient for the National Assembly for Wales to monitor the progress of those programmes closely given the past issues we've had with data collection. I would like to remind Members that it was only recently that we found some of the data at Cwm Taf Morgannwg was completely wrong. They had mislaid I think it was 2,700 operations, appointments and results. We need efficient, good data. This Bill gives us the opportunity to do it. Please, Members, consider that and pass this amendment.