1. Will the First Minister provide an update on NHS recruitment in Wales? OAQ55242

Llywydd, NHS organisations continue to recruit staff from within the UK and from overseas, with record levels of investment in health professional education and training. As a result, there are now more doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals working in the NHS in Wales than at any previous time. 

Thank you, First Minister, for your answer. There are currently over 1,000 vacant A&E consultant posts across England and Wales. Now, this is a concern for all of us, of course, but particularly in my local health board area of Cwm Taf Morgannwg, where the ability to recruit consultants to the Royal Glamorgan Hospital—or inability, I should say—has left that A&E department under threat of reduced opening hours or even closure. That's of considerable concern to my constituents in normal times, but especially now during the coronavirus outbreak. 

What reassurance can you provide that the Welsh Government is doing all that it can to recruit A&E consultants in this very difficult and competitive jobs market?

Well, Llywydd, the Member is absolutely right to say that the recruitment of A&E consultants is competitive right across the United Kingdom, and there are vacancies in every one of the four home nations. Nonetheless, the number of A&E consultants working in the Welsh NHS has more than doubled over the last decade, and that suggests that despite the very real challenges, there has been some success in the recruitment efforts of individual health boards, and in the efforts that are being made to grow our own pipeline of doctors coming through the system who will be the consultants of the future.

My colleague, Vaughan Gething, has decided that the 'Train. Work. Live' campaign, which has been very successful in recruitment to the Welsh NHS, will have a particular focus on the recruitment of emergency medicine staff over the year ahead, and that will reinforce the efforts that health boards themselves are making to recruit to vacancies. 

I'd like to just take a tiny liberty with this question, if I may, First Minister, and start off by extending my heartfelt thanks, and I'm sure the thanks of all of us, to our NHS and social care staff, who know that they're about to face the battle of their lives on our behalf, and they are doing so. And I am very grateful for all that they have done and will do. 

And, again, a slight liberty with the word 'recruitment' because, of course, I'd like to talk about the staff and the help that we need now facing the coronavirus. And I just wondered if you could tell us whether—. We've made much about perhaps recruiting or re-recruiting back into the workforce people who've just left us, just retired, and I wondered if you might be able to give us any update on whether you've had thoughts about approaching final-year medical students, final-year nursing students, and obviously their representative bodies, because these people will be very au fait with current policy and they'll certainly be very, very adept at doing ventilators, respiratory work and all the rest of it, and seeing if, perhaps, with their goodwill, and obviously, the right conditions, we might be able to recruit them into helping to supplement our current workforce. 

I thank Angela Burns for both the points she's made. She's absolutely right that staff in our health and social care sectors know that they face an enormous challenge over the weeks ahead. One of the reasons why we announced on Friday of last week that we were going to remove some of the obligations on general practitioners to carry out routine screening and monitoring appointments, to reduce the number of routine appointments in out-patients, as well as freeing up capacity to see other patients with more urgent needs—. Those actions were also designed to free up the time of clinicians who will need retraining in the workplace to be able to deal with the urgent problems they will now face. 

As far as final-year students in medicine and in nursing are concerned, we are engaged with our UK colleagues on that agenda. It's one of those things where I think, if at all possible, we should move together on it, because there will be royal college considerations, there will be licensing considerations. And we need to make sure that those relatively technical but quite important if you're a practicing clinician to know that you're protected in the decisions you make—that we resolve those problems on a UK basis, to make the very most of, as Angela Burns has said, people who are just completing their training, and very well equipped, in the right circumstances, to step in and assist.