Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:33 pm on 11 January 2022.
Well, Llywydd, the position on masks is this: that there is a national specialist group that advises the Government on the use of personal protective equipment, including higher grade masks. At the start of December, the chief nursing officer and the chief medical officer asked that committee for updated advice, looking at those masks in the context of the omicron variant. We follow their advice. Their advice is that those masks should not be made available everywhere, but, in the advice that they published, they drew to the attention of health boards in Wales the flexibility that health boards have to extend the use of such masks in clinical settings where a local judgment would assess them as being a part of the protections available to staff. And I notice that the number of those masks that have been provided by shared services in more recent weeks has gone up across Wales. And while that remains the advice of the expert committee, I think that is the advice we simply have to follow here in Wales—not universal use of them, but flexibility for local decision making and greater use of them where that is felt to be an important clinical safeguard.