Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:59 pm on 26 April 2022.
All the cancer charities in Wales would agree with you that we need a new urgent focus on early diagnosis and detection, but they say that needs to be put at the heart of a new comprehensive cancer strategy for Wales, in line with the recommendations of the World Health Organization. Now, I heard you say previously that the various existing documents that exist, and you could argue that you can add to that the programme for planned care, which you're publishing today, which raises the 62-day target from 75 per cent to 80 per cent—all of this, you would say, maybe amounts to a strategy. But surely the fact that that target, even before the pandemic, most health boards weren't achieving, the fact that the cancer mortality gap within Wales between deprived and affluent areas is worse now than it was 20 years ago, the fact that people with cancer in Wales are being forced to go private, as the recent Health and Social Care Committee report on waiting times testified, taken together suggests, does it not, even if you maintain, against everything that every cancer charity in Wales is saying, that we do have a cancer strategy, that the strategy is failing and it needs urgently to be replaced if we are to avoid, in the future, thousands of preventable and premature deaths amongst cancer patients in Wales.