10. Plaid Cymru Debate: A&E services at the Royal Glamorgan Hospital

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:20 pm on 11 March 2020.

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Photo of Delyth Jewell Delyth Jewell Plaid Cymru 5:20, 11 March 2020

I would agree entirely. With the point, absolutely.

Now, I know from personal experience how long waiting times in A&E already are in Prince Charles. The staff do an excellent job under tremendous strain, but patients are routinely left waiting for hours and there aren't enough beds. My grandmother passed away last year after a number of years of ill health. During her final year, she attended Prince Charles A&E on a number of occasions with my parents, and later with carers after she'd fallen. On one occasion, my grandmother was waiting for nine hours on a trolley in a corridor because there weren't any beds. She was 99 at the time and suffering from dementia. Now, again, the staff did everything they could, but it was not appropriate for a woman of that age to be without a bed for that long. Imagine what impact an influx of new patients will have on this already struggling A&E.

Now, time is short, so I'll say one other thing. I am going to echo what's already been said in this debate. I am dismayed with the Government's amendment that implies, in some way, that responsibility for the NHS lies ultimately not with the Welsh Government, but with health boards. That isn't true, and the Government's amendments is almost a slight of hand in that way, and it will confuse voters.

The main argument of those who seek to undermine the Senedd is that it has failed to deliver, but this plays on people's confusion between the legislature and the executive—that is the Senedd that is an institution and the Government that sets the policies. I'm afraid it is in the interests of the Welsh Government to feed this confusion in this instance in order to avoid accountability, and this is what they've done with the Royal Glam. A Labour backbencher recently went as far as to claim publicly that the Welsh Government is not responsible for managing NHS, only for its funding. Now, that's simply isn't true, and Labour, I'm afraid, should be ashamed that they are attempting to paint the whole of this Senedd with the brush of a failure that is purely their own.

Now, the Welsh Government has here decided to delete the first clause of the Plaid motion, and in doing that, the Government has failed to acknowledge its own role in overseeing and ultimately managing the NHS. Now, worst still, it's actions like that that feed an atmosphere of distrust in politics and a general confusion over what areas are devolved and who controls what. Now, I am finishing now. It might not seem like a lot—this 'delete all' from the Government—but it's actions like this that are more damaging than we can realise. Trust matters, and we should all care about that.