Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:51 pm on 7 December 2021.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 1:51, 7 December 2021

Thanks again to Andrew R.T. Davies. We will make those announcements as fast as we are able to. There are a couple of pieces of the jigsaw that we are still completing. We hope to get additional help in this coming vaccination campaign from the fire and rescue service, for example, who do a great deal as first responders and who we think, with some extra attention, would be able to provide vaccinators. We are looking to involve more help from the armed forces as we did earlier in the pandemic, and we're just waiting to get the final confirmation of the help that we can get from them. And, of course, pharmacies are another major contributor to vaccinations. So, there are just some bits of the jigsaw that we are waiting for final confirmation on. All of those would help us to reduce the need for GPs to pull back from some of their more routine activity, because we want to minimise that as well, and to do so for exactly the reasons that the leader of the opposition has said.

The system as a whole is under enormous pressure in every part of it, and if we reduce activity in one part of the system, the risk is that you just displace that activity into some other part of the system that is already hugely pressurised. So, I'm hoping that, very shortly, as fast as possible—we're talking days, not weeks—we will be able to make that announcement, but there are just those final bits that we need to make sure that we've got completely in place, so that we can use primary care and our GP teams, but do it in a way that allows them as much as possible to go on doing the other very important things that they provide.