Hospital Services

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:12 pm on 17 May 2022.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:12, 17 May 2022

I referred in my original answer to the fact that Aneurin Bevan University Health Board has been reviewing the way in which its structure of hospital services, and not just hospital services, is currently configured. I don't agree with the point the Member made about downgrading and fragmentation; I think the Clinical Futures programme was a model of how a planned system can be developed to provide services in a part of Wales. I'm sure that the Member is right that the model always needs to be kept under review; we've always got to be making sure that it's working as it is intended.

The model is a genuinely thoroughgoing one. It has the Grange hospital providing specialist services and critical care, it has three enhanced local general hospitals—the Royal Gwent, Nevill Hall and Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr—and it then has three further community hospitals—Ysbyty Aneurin Bevan, the Chepstow hospital and the county hospital. And it has urgent primary care centres—so, two new urgent primary care centres, one at the Royal Gwent and one at Nevill Hall, established with additional funding from the Welsh Government. Eighty-two thousand patients have now been seen at those new urgent primary care centres to make sure that people can receive those services as close to home as possible. And then you have, beyond that, the network of primary care services itself.

I'm sure that Delyth Jewell will welcome the ambition in the planned care programme, published by my colleague Eluned Morgan only a couple of weeks ago—[Inaudible.]—people would have had to travel to a hospital to receive can be now provided online with people in their own homes, and that 50 per cent of all follow-up appointments can clinically effectively be delivered in that way. We need to think about how the lessons we have learned over the last couple of years can be put to work to avoid some of those unnecessary and difficult journeys for people who are unwell in the first place and that previously would've been the routine way in which services would be provided. We can do better than that, and in been doing better than that, we can make sure that some of those access issues to which Delyth Jewell has referred can be significantly improved.