Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:54 pm on 7 July 2021.
If I could turn next to orthopaedic services, there are huge challenges facing you in building capacity. I and every other Member here, I'm sure, will have heard about far too many patients waiting far, far too long in pain. In April of this year, there were 88,000 people waiting for trauma and orthopaedic treatment, with 60 per cent waiting over 36 weeks. The figure back in 2019 was around 11 per cent. Over half now wait for longer than 12 months. Of course, these waiting lists, again, were too long prior to the pandemic, so what assurance can you give us that, in trying to deal with the acute problem of the backlog caused by the pandemic, you will do far more than just restore services to where they were previously? How will you now try to create services that are more sustainable for the longer term, because that is what we are looking for in coming out of this pandemic?