Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:44 pm on 30 November 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:44, 30 November 2021

No, I don't in that simplistic way, Llywydd. The Member, of course, is right that the NHS in Wales is struggling under the demands that it is currently having to address, and that is about to get worse and more difficult because of the new variant that has already arrived in the United Kingdom. The health service is dealing with the impact of a global pandemic, with the delays in treatment that that has inevitably created. It is dealing with all the everyday things that we expect it to do—delivering the flu vaccination programme in primary care, for example—and, at the same time, it is responding to record levels of demand through the emergency system and through A&E departments. I think it is very important—and in this way, I have agreed in the past with advice from the college of emergency medicine—that that has to be seen as a problem, not just at the front door at the hospital, but for the hospital as a whole, and that the whole system has to find a way of responding to the very many pressures that the service is currently under. I think it is a very sobering truth, Llywydd, that these problems are about to get even more challenging over the coming weeks as we try and respond to the latest twist and turn in the very challenging story of coronavirus.