Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:04 pm on 10 November 2020.
Well, I do entirely agree, Llywydd, and said so myself in answer to Paul Davies's second question, that one of the real constraints we face this winter is in the finite number of staff that we have, the experience they have all gone through, the fact that, as front-line staff, they are particularly vulnerable themselves to contracting coronavirus, their recovery is no different to anybody else and is often a long and difficult one. So, I said to the leader of the opposition that the quarter 3 and quarter 4 plans from our NHS colleagues focus particularly on making sure that we can sustain our staff through this very difficult period. We've provided new services, available to whole breadth of NHS staff, in relation to mental health; we've provided further training to staff to be able to deal with a broader range of demands that will come their way. But, when we look forward to a winter in which coronavirus shows very little sign of going away, where we've yet to begin the flu season, where winter brings with it all the other things that we know happen when you have an older, sicker, more vulnerable population, as Adam Price says, then doing everything we can to support our colleagues in the health service is top of my agenda and that of the health Minister here.
Some of the things we were able to use earlier in the year are not so easily available to us. We were, as Paul Davies will know, back in April and May, able to recruit students who were just finishing their courses; they were ready to be deployed in clinical circumstances. That isn't the case in November and December. We recruited back into the service people who had recently retired and were willing to come back. We may well be looking to people to help us in that way again.
The good news is that, despite all of this, recruitment to the Welsh NHS does go on being very successful. We have filled our general practitioner training rotas, and overfilled them this year, compared to any other year, including in north Wales, which the Member mentioned. So, the longer term sustainability of our health service staff is based upon our ability to recruit into courses, into training schemes, and, on that score, despite the very bleak year we're in, we continue to do well in Wales.