You asked about a communication strategy. You'll know that there has been a very active communication strategy already, particularly with those who are waiting the longest. Your committee has written a very interesting report, and you'll know from that that the Living Well programme gives advice to people in terms of how they can live well while they're waiting for their operations. Obviously we'll be interested to see if and when other health boards will pick up on that. I will be requiring monthly briefings from my team, but I'm sure that they will be monitoring in real time what's been going on. If there are facilities that are not being used—in particular 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. full-time, all of the time—I'll want to know why, and I'm sure you'll be interested to know why as well. There is a target you can hold me to at the end of this year, in fact, as well, where we're saying that people should have their first appointment by the end of this year. We know that many—around 50 per cent, if not more—are waiting for that first initial appointment. So, hopefully, that will help us out.

When it comes to e-prescribing, you know my frustrations, Russell, in relation to this. You'll know that I've put money on the table, but I can assure you that I'm on it. I had a meeting just yesterday to go through how we can speed up the process, because, as you know, I'm not satisfied with waiting for three years for that to happen, and I do think that that could potentially make a big difference in terms of people's time. 

You're quite right to focus on not just recruitment, because I think we do have pipelines of recruitment ongoing. We have about 78 per cent more nurses in training than we've had before. We've got about 97 per cent more midwives in training than we've had before. The real issue for me is retention—how do we keep people in the system. In order to do that, we need to incentivise, we need to make sure that there are opportunities for them to make more money, perhaps, through working longer hours. So, all of those things are opportunities for them.

You're quite right to ask what help can a virtual consultation give. What it can do is the preparation work. Obviously, it's not going to help for the operation itself, but there's a lot of pre-op work that can be done virtually, and I think it's really important that that is done. But also, I think we've got to get people to understand that surgery is not always the only option and always the best option. I'm looking at your colleague behind who is an expert in this area, so I'm always very aware of the way I'm speaking when I have such an expert in the Chamber. I was speaking to somebody just this week who was told initially that he may need surgery on his shoulder, and now, actually, some intensive physio has corrected the problem. I think we do need to get people to understand that there are alternatives to surgery.

When you talk about building back better, I was waiting for your surgical hubs, I was waiting for your question around what we're doing in terms of COVID-lite hubs, and I can tell you that, actually, some of these are already up and running. In Cardiff, for example, we have a cataract theatre where, between Cardiff and Swansea, we'll be seeing 600 people per month. That is already up and running. We are going to be seeing a new trauma and orthopaedic centre being developed in Aneurin Bevan in the Royal Gwent. That's going have £1 million, and that's going to see around 3,650 people regularly. There's going to be a new orthopaedic and spinal surgical unit in Swansea and Hywel Dda. That's going to be a green area, that's going to be separate, so it won't be knocked out by urgent care that comes in through the door. I know that's something that surgeons have been asking for. We're going to try and make sure that we separate these paths out as much as possible. It is quite difficult when all the beds are full. It is important that we try and maintain that flow through the system, but also that we have reserve beds, if we can, for surgery to be able to continue.

Then, just in terms of waiting lists, obviously, the pandemic has knocked all of our plans out. We were actually improving as we went into the pandemic. In 2019 there were only 9,000 people waiting for 36 weeks. And I would ask you, Russell, to stop comparing apples and pears. The way that we count in Wales is very, very different from the way they count in England. First of all, it's not all about the numbers of people. So, when we see 700,000 people—