6. Welsh Conservatives Debate: Ambulance response times

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:08 pm on 22 September 2021.

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Photo of Mike Hedges Mike Hedges Labour 4:08, 22 September 2021

I agree it should be one of the easiest things to solve. I can't talk about Wrexham Maelor, but I can talk about Morriston Hospital, and the thing that causes the problem there is the physical number of people. They haven't got doctors sitting around doing nothing in Morriston, but if Wrexham Maelor would like to send some of their doctors down to Morriston, we'd very much welcome them. We haven't got people sitting around doing nothing; what we've just got is a huge queue. You can have 50 or 60 people there. Some are seriously ill, they've had a stroke, they've had a heart attack, they've had a serious accident, they need to be checked whether they've broken their neck or not, and others have turned up who are not feeling very well and they just can't see a doctor.

I sent this to the Minister regarding one of my constituents—and I was talking to the health board—who had a growth on his neck, which kept on getting bigger and bigger. He spent four days failing to see his GP, because he was forty-first or forty-second in line. We cannot have this sort of, 'You join a queue and you're either lucky or unlucky.'

Finally, the Welsh ambulance service is not working effectively. I believe, to get the best out of the ambulance service, it should be split up and run by the individual health boards, like it used to be, so the health board has ownership of the ambulance service. It's their fault, not somebody else's.