Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:00 pm on 17 March 2020.
First Minister, thank you for your statement this afternoon. Could I endorse the comments from colleagues who have touched on the mental health aspect of this? We are literally seeing people's everyday lives, in whatever sphere of life they live, taken apart by this, and uniformity and regularity is one of the stabilising factors in most people's lives. Whilst I appreciate all the efforts that the NHS has dedicated to critical care provision at the moment and making bed provision, there will be a massive demand on the mental health provision services that are in this country. I do take comfort from you alluding to the fact of rural communities and the support that has been in place for rural communities through some of the tribulations over the last 20 years that they have gone through.
Two things I'd like to ask of you, if possible, please, First Minister. The first one is building on the point that Janet Finch-Saunders raised about people who might be able to help in the care sector. I've had various care homes over the last 48 hours come and point to the fact that their staffing numbers are diminishing by the day and, obviously, under the rules, staff have to be registered—and rightly so have to be registered—for it to be a safe environment. But there is scope, I would suggest, from the argument that's been put to me, of consideration being given to new registrations and working with the inspectorate to make sure the environment is in place so that care home providers can work in a new environment to get registrations through and deal with the circumstances they face at the moment and in the coming weeks, which are unique circumstances. I'd be grateful to understand has any progress been made on that.
The second—and I appreciate you might not be able to give me an answer at the moment, and in the scheme of what you're dealing with at the moment it almost seems an irrelevance, but given that operations have been cancelled, normal operations, everyday operations have been cancelled, it's not unreasonable for people who have approached myself and many other Assembly Members to try and understand when an element of operations that we would class as normal might be reintroduced into the NHS. As we stand here today, that seems a very distant prospect, that does. I see England have just joined the same regime as Wales announced on Friday. But it's not an unreasonable request for constituents coming to Assembly Members to try and understand when that long-awaited operation that they've been waiting for to take them out of pain and put them on the road to recovery might—might—be factored into the NHS going forward. It might be six months; it might be three months; it might even be 12 months, but some sense of when we might be able to inform constituents of that normalisation would be appreciated.