Part of 1. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 24 March 2021.
I'm afraid this is where I have a slight difference with you, because everybody talks about 'when the pandemic is over', and I actually think we've gone past that—we've gone past the crisis. We're now in a situation where this is endemic. We're going to have a situation where we're going to be in this position for a long, long time to come. We can't keep saying, 'Oh, we're just in a crisis; we're just in a crisis—how do we handle that?' We've got to look beyond that.
I thought that the COVID-19 forward work programme did have some really good things in it, but it comes back to some of the issues that we really found out when we did the cross-party parliamentary group on how to deliver health and social care. There's a lot of, 'We know what the challenges are', but not a lot of, 'How are we going to solve them?' And you yourself have just mentioned our exhausted staff in the NHS and social care services. And I listened to the director of the Royal College of Nursing last night at the commemoration event, talking about how exhausted and traumatised so many of the staff in the health and social care sectors are. And I do worry, reading this COVID-19 forward plan—it talks about, 'We do have a workforce deficit'; well, it's more than just a small workforce deficit. How are we going to be able to manage that on top of creating that space to allow those who have been working so hard over this last year and who are so exhausted—how are we going to allow them the time to recover and get back and start picking up all of these elective surgeries? And there wasn't much talk about recruitment policies, retraining policies, retention policies. You know our plan, we've got a very strong recruit, retain, retrain policy. I didn't see much of that. Can you give us some overview of how you're going to be able to bolster that hard-working but shattered workforce?