Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:48 pm on 25 January 2022.
Llywydd, I think the health Minister is right that, in the short run, we're yet to see in the figures published so far the impact of the omicron wave and the need to divert health service resources to the vaccination programme carried out during December. So, I think the health Minister, through the modelling that is carried out, was simply warning people that the difficult position that will be facing the NHS is going to get worse before it gets better. But the Member Paul Davies will have seen the British Medical Association in Wales saying that, even in the figures published last week, there are the first signs of recovery, and that is underpinned by modelling, modelling carried out by health boards, modelling carried out across specialities, backed up very often by national arrangements, for example in orthopaedics, to make sure that we are trying our best to match new capacity to deal with the pent-up demand that has grown over the last 20 months. And there are a series of ways in which health boards will be planning to do that—maximising their own capacity, carrying out more lists at weekends, looking to co-operate across borders with other health boards and across the border into England, for those counties and health boards that sit along that border, and then to be able to see the tide turn on the lists that have built up over the last COVID-dominated period.