3. Will the First Minister make a statement on cancer treatment in north Wales? OQ57026

Llywydd, cancer services in north Wales continue to recover from the impact of the pandemic. In July this year, for example, 374 patients started definitive cancer treatment, and that is 114 more than in the July of the previous year.

Thank you, First Minister, and I'm only sorry that I had to raise this with you today, but such are my concerns. First Minister, NHS diagnostic and therapy service waiting times for July this year show an eleven-fold increase in the number of people waiting over eight weeks for one of seven key tests used to diagnose cancer, and startlingly, one third of patients in the Betsi Cadwaladr region do not start their first definitive treatment in the month within 62 days of first being suspected of cancer. I've been really shocked recently to hear of some of my constituents and patients of Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board learning that they are being informed, on some occasions, of a life-changing, devastating cancer diagnosis simply by the telephone rather than a personable face-to-face discussion, and this has caused a lot of further anxiety to my constituents. Even more troubling, I know of one constituent who, following a stage 4 terminal cancer diagnosis, was not even advised of the treatment options available at the time of this diagnosis, instead, just saying simply that a referral will be made at some stage going forward to Wrexham or Liverpool. That was until I made several representations on their behalf.

Can you come to a question now, Janet Finch-Saunders?

Yes, of course.

Alongside delayed diagnoses, there is a concerning gap between diagnosis and finding that treatment. So, what steps, First Minister, will you take to ensure that you close that gap between a devastating cancer diagnosis and the treatment options available to those affected? Diolch, Llywydd.

Llywydd, I thank the Member for that question. As you understand, I'm not in a position ever to comment on individual encounters between clinicians and their patients. I think there are two general points that the Member makes that I'd like to address. She's right that diagnostic services are under huge pressure. We worried on the floor of the Senedd during the pandemic about the delays in people coming forward to make their conditions known to clinicians. Thankfully, we've had some impact on that and more people are coming forward, but, of course, when they come forward in those numbers, it inevitably puts diagnostic systems under pressure. She will know that the Betsi Cadwaladr health board has recently approved a business case to pilot three rapid diagnostic centres—one in each of its three main hospitals—and that they are in the business now of recruiting the specialist nurses and the radiology time that they will need to get those diagnostic centres up and running early, as they hope, in the new year. So, I hope that that will make a difference to some of the individuals that Janet Finch-Saunders has mentioned this afternoon.

On the issue of how clinicians communicate their diagnoses to people, I don't think it's possible, in the Chamber of the Senedd, to make general rules about how that is best done. It needs to be done sensitively, of course, and it needs to be done with the best interests of the patient at the heart of it. And there will be some patients, won't there, for whom it is better for them that they have a conversation with their clinician while they're in their own homes, rather than asking them, ill as they are, to make inconvenient journeys to quite-far-away destinations where there are a lot of other very ill people, to be told what the clinician is able to tell them in a conversation in their own homes. Now, that won't suit everybody, I completely understand that, but nor do I think that it is probably right to say that everybody will prefer to make that journey to wait to see somebody to be told what they could've been told in other circumstances. It's for the clinician, with the patient, to make a judgment about the best way in which that can be done. And we have to have some trust in our clinicians that they go about that business—they're in the business of treating people with cancer, after all, that is what they've dedicated their professional lives to doing, and that they do it with that sensitivity in mind.