Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:42 pm on 20 September 2022.
Llywydd, the health Minister will be very happy, I know, to provide Members with an update on the more detailed results of the summit. In general, the leader of the opposition is right to draw attention to the pressures that the health service is under and the very hard work that is going on to try and recover the ground that was lost during the pandemic. Very long waits in the Welsh NHS continue to fall. Activity in our NHS continues to recover. In the last month for which figures are available, we are back to 97 per cent of all out-patient activity, compared to the month before the pandemic began. And in planned operations, we're back to over 80 per cent. Now, that means there's still ground to go. The COVID issue that Joel James raised is still part of that picture. A thousand staff in the NHS in Wales are not in work today either because they have COVID themselves or they've been in direct contact with somebody who has. So, a huge amount of work is going on inside the health service to try and recover ground and to be able to deal with people whose operations are outstanding. The context remains a challenging one.