Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:54 pm on 12 October 2021.
I agree with what the Member says about the pressures that there are on the system, and they are in all parts of the system. Many GPs have chosen to take early retirement because of the changes in their pension arrangements that his Government at Westminster introduced, which meant that it was simply financially not sensible for them to continue in the jobs that they had done. We have urged the UK Government many times to remove the perverse incentives that have led to some people taking themselves out of the workforce earlier than they otherwise would have done.
The future of GP services—GPs in that narrow sense—lies in our ability to recruit more people into the profession, and to train here in Wales. He'll be well aware of the very healthy figures that we have achieved in recent times in reaching and overreaching the targets that we had set for GP trainees in Wales. I think in an answer to a question last week I explained how the number of GP trainees in north Wales was to be raised again next year. GPs by themselves are not the whole answer to primary care, in the way that I've described already, Llywydd, and what we will do as a Government is to invest in that wider set of professionals, changing the nature of primary care, bringing it into line with the way in which people who work in it see their futures as professional workers here in Wales, providing them with the twenty-first century surgeries that we are committed to in our manifesto, and continuing to celebrate the efforts that day in, day out see thousands and thousands of people successfully treated by primary care clinicians in Wales every single day.