Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:58 pm on 6 October 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:58, 6 October 2020

Well, Llywydd, the Member would find the answer to his questions in the quarterly plans that the NHS in Wales is required to publish. Plans for quarters 3 and 4 were published only recently; they demonstrate the actions that are being taken by health boards right across Wales to accelerate a return to the sort of activity that the health service would have been carrying out this time last year, before the coronavirus crisis hit. And that does include the creation of more green zones—it's not always possible in Wales to create whole hospitals as green zones. It's inevitable, given our geography and disposition of services that, in some places, hospitals will have to be divided into zones that deal with coronavirus patients and green zones that are COVID-free. But that work is going on, and our colleagues in the health service, who have had such a torrid time over the last six months, are working as hard as they can in order to be able, both to deal with the rising number of coronavirus patients who are coming into our hospitals—I quoted that figure earlier to Mark Isherwood: over 200 more beds occupied by coronavirus cases today than two weeks ago—. The health service is having to cope with all of that, and it is, at the same time and with the same staff, doing its very best to make inroads into the delays that have inevitably occurred in more routine treatments for other patients.