Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:14 pm on 17 November 2020.
Well, can I thank John Griffiths for that question, Llywydd, and particularly for what he said at the start? I'd very much like to congratulate—and I'm sure Members here would—Poppy and her parents. The first child to be born at the new hospital, and to be born on Aneurin Bevan's birthday—what a fantastic start for the hospital and for that family, and it's a sign of what is to come from that state-of-the-art hospital in scale, size and purpose, the single most important hospital since the university hospital here in Cardiff was opened at the beginning of the 1970s.
It will do a very, very important job over this winter, in helping us to deal with the coronavirus crisis, with the hundreds of extra beds that it provides in that part of Wales, but in the longer run, in fulfilling the Gwent Clinical Futures vision, which I know John Griffiths, as the local Member, will have been much involved in, nearly a decade ago, when that was being planned and produced. It's a very proud moment, I think, for us here in Wales to have seen that facility open ahead of time and available to that local population.
It will be an important part, Llywydd, of the way in which that facility and health services more generally in the Gwent area will be able to develop over this winter by using some of the new mass testing possibilities. As in so much of coronavirus, this is happening very rapidly around us all the time, and we're likely to have thousands of these lateral-flow tests available to us in Wales every day in the very near future, and that will give us new possibilities in asymptomatic testing of front-line workers, and we may be able to do more to allow children who, at the moment, have to go home if a single child is found to have coronavirus in a school—we may be able to deploy them to allow those children to return more rapidly to education. So, there's a lot of work going on with our colleagues in the health service and others to make sure that this new possibility is put to work in those parts of Welsh society where it has the most impact, and, Llywydd, we've talked previously on the floor of the Senedd here about using them to enable visits to care homes, one of the really, really difficult issues that families have had to face over this extraordinary period.