Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:50 pm on 15 December 2020.
Llywydd, I think it's fair for me to point out that Wales is, as the leader of the opposition says, at the highest level of coronavirus in the United Kingdom today. At various points, all four nations have been in that position. England was in it earlier in the summer, Northern Ireland was in that position a few weeks ago, Scotland have had the same experience in relation to the central belt. So, this is an evolving pattern in which spikes occur in different places.
As far as capacity in the health service is concerned, there are two sorts of capacity that we're talking about. There's physical capacity in terms of bed numbers: 16 per cent of acute beds in the Welsh NHS are not occupied today. So, physical capacity is stretched, but not stretched to breaking point. The other capacity we're talking about is staff, and that's where the current difficulties I think are at their most acute. We have the highest number of staff at any point during this year who are self-isolating and for other reasons not available to be in work; 1,500 more people last week than was the case in September. And the problem that has been faced in some parts of the NHS, and the reason why some non-urgent treatments are being suspended, is because we simply don't have staff in place to keep everything that the health service wants to do going, and we're having to concentrate the staff resources we have on those most urgent things, including providing for the rising number of people suffering from coronavirus. So, we rely on a regular engagement with all our health boards, to look at the capacity of the system to continue to do things other than coronavirus, and that varies from health board to health board at the moment, but it is a daily engagement that we have with them in order to make sure that, as far as possible, the health service does all the things we would all want it to do.
As to the letter on mutual aid, of course, I will reply to it, once again endorsing the principle of mutual aid that has been there through coronavirus. Wales has supplied 11 million items of PPE to the English NHS during this crisis as part of our mutual aid, and the letter that I've received today restates that, and I'm very happy to once again endorse it.