Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 10 November 2020.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:00, 10 November 2020

Well, Llywydd, of course we discuss these things all the time with our local health boards. The Member will see in their quarter 3 and quarter 4 plans all the actions that they are taking to try to provide for non-coronavirus care while dealing with the impact of the global pandemic. What health boards say to us is that their staff are exhausted by the experience of this year, and that we are going to be asking them again this winter to cope not just with the over 1,000—well, over 1,400—patients who are now in beds in Welsh hospitals suffering from coronavirus, but we are going to ask them to do all those other things as well. And our health boards report, as do organisations like the Royal Society of Medicine and so on, real concerns about the resilience of our workforce in everything that we are asking of them, and much of what we are doing is to try to make sure that we look after those staff so that they can go on doing all the things that Paul Davies has suggested. 

The idea of coronavirus-free hospitals in Wales is a difficult one, I think. Our health boards are preferring to have green zones and red zones inside existing hospitals. I'll give him the example that he will know the best. What would he like Withybush to be—a hospital devoted to coronavirus only, so that anybody with coronavirus ends up in Withybush, or anybody in the Withybush area who has coronavirus has to go somewhere else for their care, because Withybush has become a non-COVID hospital? And that's a difficult issue, as he will recognise, in every part of Wales, isn't it? Because we have rural communities with single hospitals, small often in scale, doing everything that is needed for that local population. And if you're in a very big metropolitan area, where you've got hospitals close by to one another, then maybe that is a viable possibility. I think it's much harder to make it fit the geography and the population distribution in Wales.