Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:33 pm on 17 March 2020.
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.