4. Will the First Minister make a statement on the delivery of health services in Preseli Pembrokeshire? OQ58385

Hywel Dda University Health Board continues to develop its proposals for the future delivery of services across its area. That has involved workshops with members of the public, staff and partners. The latest decisions were taken by the board at its meeting on 4 August.

First Minister, it's vital that high-quality dental care is available to people when they need it, and yet I continue to receive correspondence from frustrated and indeed angry constituents who are living with discomfort and pain because they've not been able to access a local NHS dentist. In one case, a constituent was advised to buy a self filling kit in order to provide some temporary solution whilst waiting for an appointment. I'm sure you will find that totally unacceptable. I appreciate that we've experienced a COVID pandemic, but this is a long-standing issue that was prevalent well before the COVID pandemic. So, can you tell us what the Welsh Government is doing to ensure that people can have access, or indeed register, with an NHS dentist? Can you also tell us what intermediate support is being offered to patients who are waiting for long periods of time for dental services and treatment?

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.