Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:00 pm on 24 February 2021.
If I deal with the point about the figures first, and then deal with your point about health inequalities, on the figures, the figures are accurate in terms of the number of appointments that are outstanding, but there isn't one fifth of people who have an outstanding appointment because some of those will be individuals on more than one list, and that's the point that I'm making. In terms of the number of people that are really waiting, it isn't actually one in five of the population. The figure you quote is an accurate figure for the number of individual appointments. I myself know that I could potentially be on two waiting lists, for the sake of argument, if I were a new patient with the two individual issues where the NHS regularly cares for me. So, that's the point that I'm making in having an accurate conversation about the scale of the challenge we face.
On your point about healthcare inequalities, we recognise the pandemic has exacerbated healthcare inequalities and made them even more stark than they were before. The level of harm, the different harm that has been meted out by coronavirus—. It is not a great leveller. It is the reality that harm is done in those communities, those families, those individuals who started this pandemic with the greatest number of health inequalities at the outset.
We have to make sure that the recovery does properly take account of that in how we prioritise people in the greatest clinical need, how we get to those people first, and how we make sure that our recovery doesn't exacerbate, yet again, the healthcare inequalities that there are. That means that it can't be about the sharpest elbows finding their way through a system. It's actually about how we deliberately design a recovery that does take account of all of those healthcare inequalities, and that will be difficult because of the scale of the challenge that we have. But I actually think that our prudent healthcare and value-based healthcare approach will help us to do that, to drive that into our system. This is all entirely consistent with the 'A Healthier Wales' approach that we have, where, of course, you'll recall from the outset of this term, from the parliamentary review to having 'A Healthier Wales', healthcare inequalities were very much at the heart of that plan, and they'll need to be at the heart of our recovery approach, too.