The experience of Altaf Hussain is, I'm sure, repeated, and I know it's repeated, amongst many of my constituents, but that doesn't really get us very far, in the sense that we can acknowledge that the service is under huge strain at the moment, not least the pent-up demand from two years of lockdown, but also the reduced capacity of hospitals caused by the additional public health measures needed. It is no use operating on somebody for a particular complaint and then they get COVID during that intervention, because, obviously, the health outcomes from that are unlikely to be very good. And it's also the case that health staff catch COVID too, and we definitely don't want them coming into work when they've got COVID, and that reduces the capacity of professional staff. And these are not people we can just pick off the supermarket floor and get to come in and do the job in the hospital instead; these are trained people who need years of training in order to be able to do their jobs. 

So, I think we have to acknowledge the pain that everybody's going through, and the health Minister does that regularly, but we have to come up with solutions that are coherent and that are also doable. Because it is just two weeks and one day since the health Minister announced the recovery plan from COVID, and it's a little bit early at the moment to say, 'What's happening, and why isn't it working?' So, I think that we need to have a little bit more critical use of our faculties to work out what we need to be doing and how we're going to get there.

Certainly, we had a broken system before. If we've got somewhere between 20 per cent and 25 per cent of the population waiting for a hospital appointment—and it was a bit unclear from Russell's contribution which it is, but it doesn't really matter, let's just say it's one in five—that is just a staggering figure. And we just have to tackle the cause of the problem, as well as treat the symptoms, so we have to get on with the prevention agenda. And my colleague Lynne Neagle is sitting next to me; nobody could be a better Deputy Minister for public health than Lynne Neagle, and we are definitely getting on with the business of supporting people with their mental health, of tackling the obesity crisis that we have and also tackling smoking, which is obviously a major cause of cancer and many other problems, as well as obesity. These causes of ill health undoubtedly cause huge problems for the individual and for the health service system. And the best time to intervene on that, in terms of a response to Rhun ap Iorwerth, is at the beginning of the journey, which is when women are pregnant. That's when they want to change, that's when they'll give up smoking, that's when they'll change their diet. And we have to ensure that people are picking up the money that they can get when they're pregnant to ensure that they eat a healthy diet. So, there are many, many things that we need to do on that, but we can't not do it, because it's completely unsustainable to just go on the way that we are going at the moment.

One of the things we've got is—. It's no use asking for more beds—that's really not where it's at; if you've got beds, people will fill them. We need to do interventions differently, more effectively, with more skill, just like the north Wales orthopaedic surgeons who do day surgery of knee operations, enlisting the patient and their family in preparing for that operation to ensure its maximum outcome.