I thank Paul Davies for that. I agree with him, of course, on the importance of dentistry. It's not that long ago in the Chamber, Llywydd, that it was being suggested that dentists across Hywel Dda would en masse decline to take up the new dental contract that has been available since 1 April. I'm very pleased to say that 92 per cent of contracts in Hywel Dda are now being provided under the new contract, and that the new contract is already working to do what we hoped it would do, which is to reduce the amount of handle-turning work that was required under the previous units of dental activity contract, and to release dental time to take on new patients.

Twenty-eight thousand new patients across Wales have received NHS dental treatment in the first three months of this calendar year, and we expect that anything up to 110,000 to 120,000 new patients will receive dental care from the NHS over the 12 months as a result of the contract. Given the very high take-up of the contract in the Hywel Dda area, that will begin to make a difference for some of the patients to which Mr Davies referred. As a Government, we continue to provide additional funding for dentistry across the NHS—recurrent funding provided last year and again this year in order to support our colleagues in the local health boards in trying to ensure that there are dental services available.

There is a longer term issue here, which it is very important that we grasp, and that is in the nature of the profession. As you know, if you go into a GP surgery and you need relatively minor things to be done, you're very likely to be seen by a practice nurse, by a paramedic or, if you need physiotherapy, by a physiotherapist—you won't automatically see a GP. We need similar diversification to happen in the dental profession, so that when people need relatively minor procedures, there will be people properly trained, capable of doing that under the supervision of a dentist, releasing the dentists themselves—the most highly trained people we have—to do the things that only a dentist can do. That is something that we have to pursue actively with the profession during the rest of this Senedd term.