Questions Without Notice from the Party Leaders

Part of 2. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:18 pm on 29 March 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:18, 29 March 2022

Well, the assurance that I can give to Members of the Senedd and people more broadly is this: the ambulance trust is doing everything it can, with its partners in the health service more generally, to provide the service that its staff want to provide, and the investment of the Welsh Government is there to support them in that endeavour.

The thing that I cannot say, and neither can the leader of the opposition, is the extent to which the current rise in the number of people falling ill with coronavirus will impact on that service over the weeks and months to come. The leader of the opposition will know that we have some of the highest numbers of people falling ill with the virus of any time in the whole of the pandemic. Only a matter of weeks ago, we managed to reduce the number of people in our hospital beds suffering from coronavirus down to around 700. It went above 1,400 yesterday, and that number has continued to rise. That has an impact upon the whole system's ability to deal with the demands on it, including the ambulance service. Because when you have that number of people in the hospital system suffering from COVID-19, then it has an impact on our ability to discharge people, and therefore to flow patients through the system from the front door when the ambulance arrives to the point where people are able to be discharged. Also, as I said, it has a direct impact on the speed with which the ambulance service itself is able to respond to the calls that it receives, and it drives up the number of calls that are made. So, while I think the service is doing everything it can, and the investment from the Welsh Government is there to support it in all of that, it continues to operate within a very challenging context, and a context that has been deteriorating, from a pandemic perspective, over recent weeks. All of that has to be taken into account in any assurances that anybody can make about the extent to which the performance of the ambulance will reflect that context in the weeks and months to come.