7. Will the First Minister make a statement on the future of the 111 service in north Wales? OQ57392

The NHS 111 Wales service launched in north Wales for all urgent healthcare issues in June 2021. We are investing additional resources into both telephony and online elements of the service, to build resilience for the winter period and beyond, and we continue to attract high-quality staff.

Thank you for your answer, First Minister. I have to say, there are serious concerns being expressed to me that the service is unable to cope with the volume of demand. The sense among nursing professionals is that the service is being overrun, with patients having to wait hours for a basic response. I've been told, for example, that, in the past few weeks, calls have gone unanswered, and one caller had to wait 600 minutes to be triaged. Now, some of these cases need to urgently be sent to the emergency department, but due to the backlog, of course, they're being lost and delayed, to the point where some are giving up. There are no paediatric specialists on the 111 service in the north, so cases involving children, when they finally do get through, are just being referred straight to the emergency department. Similarly, the 111 mental health hub doesn't have sufficient psychiatric specialism to deal with current demand. So, will you, First Minister, accept that the 111 service, which has now, as you say, replaced the GP out-of-hours service in north Wales, isn't delivering as it should, because that's the view expressed to me by very concerned health professionals with years of experience in the field?

Llywydd, I would always want to listen to concerns raised by such voices. I did make a direct inquiry of the health board, knowing that this question would be asked of me today, and was told that concerns of that sort hadn't been raised either by the people responsible for the service or by people delivering it, although the system everywhere in Wales is under huge pressure, and we're about to ask the people we rely on to provide the 111 service, in some instances, to be part of the new booster vaccination system. So, it is not a surprise—it cannot be a surprise—to anybody to find that the system is not always able to provide as timely a response to people as it would were we in calmer territory. I asked the health board as well whether it was receiving complaints from the public about the quality of the service, and they told me that complaints were running at less than one in every 1,000 users of the service. So, this is not for a minute to discount the important points that the Member has raised—and I'll make sure that they are conveyed to the health board—but I think there's probably more than one account of the way in which the service is trying to provide a quality response to the needs of people in north Wales, despite the very real demands that we are placing on the health service in the face of the global pandemic.