Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:05 pm on 25 January 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:05, 25 January 2022

Let me begin, Llywydd, by agreeing with something that Adam Price said, because I don't think—. I didn't meant to characterise this discussion as though the Welsh Government's mind was closed on all of this, because he is right that knowledge is developing all the time. Research studies are reporting all the time. There are 19 high-quality COVID studies currently under way, and Wales is involved in quite a lot of them. So, we are continuing to follow the outcome of that debate, and if there are different forms of provision that the developing knowledge suggests that we ought to provide here in Wales, then of course that is what we will think of doing. I was reflecting, and I still do reflect, that the current state of knowledge does not lead me to believe that putting our major focus on specialist centres is the best way of getting the best help to most people. Now, as far as children are concerned, one of the problems here is that there still is no agreed definition—no agreed clinical definition—amongst the royal colleges and others who are responsible for that of what long COVID in children is meant to be. How would you make a diagnosis? How would you identify somebody? It's difficult when the definition itself is not agreed.

Now, we remain in close contact with the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health on this matter. The numbers that we know of, that are reported, of children with long COVID in Wales remain low. And you can extrapolate numbers in the way that the leader of Plaid Cymru did, but the number of children actually in the system identified as suffering from long COVID is not as high as that extrapolation would suggest. Health boards are treating those children in accordance with their specific needs. Now, we have a long COVID expert group here in Wales, and it now has a sub-group, looking specifically at how we treat children with long COVID, and there's a seminar that has been organised for 7 February for clinicians who are involved in the treatment of children to come together and to share experiences and to help us to develop our approach to providing services for them. Just as Adam Price said, Llywydd, our state of knowledge and understanding is developing, generally, all the time in relation to long COVID. I think that is particularly true of children, where knowledge and understanding probably still has quite a lot of ground to make up before we can be certain about the best ways in which those young people's needs can be met.