We should all be concerned about the possibility of nearly 1,800 vacancies across Wales, because there's no doubt that a shortage of nurses will compromise nursing care; it's inevitable. Buffy Williams has told us that it has led to a change of behaviour by health boards, and I hope, therefore, an improvement and a greater focus on ensuring that staffing levels are up to complement in acute medical and surgical wards, because that's obviously where the most acutely ill patients normally are, and therefore, the ones whose lives can be saved by better nursing.

But I suppose what I want to understand is whether the recent extension to children's wards in October last year has been successful in ensuring that we have a full complement of staff nurses in children's wards, because at the end of the day, this is all about recruitment and retention of nurses, and if we're simply begging Peter to pay Paul, we're not actually resolving the problem. If we want to extend it to community nursing and mental health settings, which sounds ideal, do these nurses actually exist out there, and if not, why not? So, I want to look at the recruitment and retention issues that all health boards are facing, and that's partly because if you're employed as a member of staff as a nurse, there isn't the flexibility that somebody who's also got caring responsibility needs to ensure that they can be only signing up for the work for which they are available, rather than what the NHS wants them to do.

If you've got small children, you are simply not going to be able to drop things overnight, work overnight, work different days when you don't have childcare; it's not possible. And so, that's one of the reasons that main scale nurses are driven into agency working. In the last financial year, 2021-22, NHS Wales spent £133 million on agency nursing, which was a 41 per cent increase on the previous financial year. Now, that would pay for the salaries of nearly 5,000 newly qualified nurses, so there's something wrong going on here, and it would be useful to hear the Minister's view on this, because agency offers better pay compared with the equivalent NHS staff pay. And that is what is leading to the bizarre situation of agency nurses travelling from London or Manchester to fill vacancies at the Heath or at Ysbyty Gwynedd.

So, I understand why the new all-Wales agency framework contract signed last year for 2021-24 is capping the hourly rates to nursing agencies, otherwise, you simply make the problem worse. But if you rely on agency nursing, you're not only spending more money that you could be spending on a permanent workforce, but you are in danger of being in a very dangerous situation where we simply don't have enough staff, and that the ones who are still working for the NHS then become completely exhausted so that they then take early retirement or go and get another job. So, this is a really important issue and, therefore, we should very much thank the petitioners for this.

I think one of the things that we could learn from is the importance of prudent healthcare and whether we are using effectively multidisciplinary teams, headed by highly qualified nurses, but with less well-qualified other people working beneath them to do some of the important caring jobs that I know are done by auxiliary nurses or by breastfeeding advisers, all depending on which setting they're working in. It seems to me that that is one solution for preventing a possible meltdown in the way that we provide nursing care, both in the community and in our hospitals.