1. What action is the Welsh Government taking to enhance healthcare provision in Carmarthen West and South Pembrokeshire? OQ58240

I thank the Member for that question, Llywydd. Amongst the actions taken by the Welsh Government is reform of the dental contract to enhance access to NHS care. Despite claims to the contrary, over 90 per cent of NHS-funded dentistry in the Member's constituency will now be provided by practices that have chosen to adopt the new contract.

Thank you, First Minister. It's actually GP surgeries that I'm going to be going in on today rather than dentistry. Yesterday evening, I had the pleasure of meeting the patient participation group of the Argyle Medical Group surgery—a collection of patients who are there to influence and advise both the staff and the wider patient community on the challenges and opportunities facing the surgery. As I've mentioned in this Siambr before, the surgery serves over 22,000 patients while employing only six registered GPs, but each one of those staff members goes above and beyond in their care for their patients. Whilst recruitment is always a welcome prospect, with possible positive news on the horizon on that front, Argyle and other rural GP surgeries will attest to the difficulties in recruiting medical practitioners to rural surgeries. Therefore, can the First Minister outline what he and his Government are doing to support rural surgeries in the recruitment and retention of GPs and other healthcare professionals, such as physiotherapists, nurse practitioners and pharmacists? And in recruiting those healthcare professionals, what work is the Welsh Government doing to educate patients that they don't always have to be seen by a GP to get fast and effective treatment? Diolch. 

Well, Llywydd, can I thank Sam Kurtz? I so much agree with the points he made at the end of that question. It's been a theme for me, ever since I was the health Minister, that the future of primary care in Wales has to be a team of professionals, often operating under the supervision of the GP, the person with the highest level of qualifications in that team, but where all those members, the pharmacists and others that he mentioned, are perfectly clinically capable of providing services direct to the patients, and sometimes more quickly and sometimes even more effectively than the generalist, the GP, will be able to do. So, I absolutely congratulate the GPs in the surgery that Sam Kurtz has mentioned. I congratulate them on having that patient participation group. We've debated that on the floor of the Senedd a number of times, wondering whether, on the model of our school councils, we ought to have an expectation that all GP practices should have a forum where they learn directly from the views and experiences of their patients. I think the last time we visited this the conclusion was that it works well where you've got GPs who are keen on the idea, and it's hard to generalise into places where maybe there's less enthusiasm for it. But, where it works, I think it brings a really powerful perspective to people who provide services by learning directly from those who are receiving them. 

As to the question about investment in future workforce, as Members here will know, we've had a very good experience in the last couple of years in recruiting GPs into training practices here in Wales. Those numbers have exceeded the threshold that we set last year and the year before, and we are doing very well to include in those training practices additional practices in rural parts of Wales. I feel confident that the general principle there is one that stands up to examination—that if you go and train somewhere, and you spend time there, it increases the chances that that is where you will want to work permanently. And it's why, of course, we are committed to a new medical school in north Wales, which will result in not simply GPs, but that wider range of health professionals being trained directly here in Wales and able to go on doing the good work that Sam Kurtz referred to this afternoon.