Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:04 pm on 15 June 2021.
Llywydd, I've no doubt at all that the pressures felt by our fantastic health and social care staff are very real. They have worked through one of the most difficult periods in our lifetimes, and they're now working equally hard to try and make up for all those things that have not been possible while dealing with coronavirus, and they're doing so now against the backcloth of the rising delta variant here in Wales, with the realistic prospect that it will be sending more people back into the health and social care system. So, I agree with what Mr Davies has said about the pressures that people have worked under.
What are we doing to help address that? Well, we are employing more staff. At the start of the last Senedd term, there were 74,000 staff in the NHS in Wales; as we go into this term, there are more than 85,000 members of staff. Those are full-time equivalent: in head count, it's well over 100,000, and that's more than 11,000 more staff in the NHS in a single term, and that at a time when his Government in Westminster was cutting the budgets of the Welsh Government year after year after year. I see him shaking his head, but it's a simple matter of fact, a fact not denied by his Government in England, who told us that austerity was something that was completely unavoidable. Despite that, we went on employing more staff in the NHS here in Wales. Over the last six years, we've increased the training places for physiotherapists by 44 per cent, for nurse training places by 72 per cent, for midwifery by 97 per cent. Those people will come out of training, including the new medical school that we're committed to in north Wales, to make sure that staffing in north Wales has a particular focus—they will be available to work in the Welsh health service. They will join those extra staff that are already there, and they will help—they will help. And it's not a solution by itself, I understand, but they will help to address the impact that the last 12 months have had on our staff in health and social care and help to lift that burden from them.