Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:49 pm on 7 July 2021.
Thanks very much. It's interesting that this has been presented as some big, sensational news story. It's not. We have been transparent about this the whole way through, about how many people are contracting COVID in hospitals. It's published on the Public Health Wales website on a regular basis. That is not done in England or elsewhere. So, if anybody wanted to see these, this is not new, it is not sensational, it has been there the whole time and you could have been tracking it.
When it comes to the public inquiry, it is very difficult to disaggregate what was going on in the rest of the UK from what's going on here. If you just take PPE, there was a relationship there. In fact, the relationship, very interestingly, was us giving parts of England some PPE. On vaccines, we were dependent on the supply working together across the United Kingdom. So, it is really difficult to disaggregate this, and that's why I do think the right approach is to have a UK inquiry but with a kind of subsection for Wales, where there will be a need to look in detail at what we can learn. But I can tell you that we are trying to learn as we go along as well.
We are very concerned about the number of people who haven't turned up in relation to cancer diagnosis and the fewer people who have presented relative to other years. That's why we have undertaken a very comprehensive advertising campaign to try and encourage people to come forward. And, of course, cancer treatment has never been stopped. We've been making sure that that has been seen as an essential service throughout the pandemic.
When it comes to COVID-lite hubs, I absolutely don't object to this in principle. The problem we have is that the implication of that is that you have to separate them off from A&E and the kind of hot issues that are coming into hospitals. Now, Russell, you might want to go around closing A&E departments, but I don't. So, I just think we've got to be really careful about the practicalities of making that happen, but we are trying to look at what alternatives there are, and I'm pleased to say that health boards have come forward with some ideas and we're analysing those at the moment.