Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:39 pm on 14 December 2022.
Well, it's clear that we spend a great deal of time preparing for winter—we know that there will be pressures during the winter months. They've already started—we've seen how much pressure there was on the services over the past weekend. It doesn't help when we see rates of scarlet fever increasing—we didn't expect to see that. So, there are things arising that we don't expect to see. But of course, additional funding is available for next year, for the health service. That is going to be a difficult situation when you factor in inflation. But there are some areas where I do think we will see a difference over the winter. One of them will be the fact that we are going to see 100 additional ambulance workers starting in post during the Christmas period. They've been in training; I hope that will take away some of the pressure from the ambulance service. And, also, there will be an announcement on Friday from the Deputy Minister, on care, which also, hopefully—. We've been working on that for many months, together with local government, to provide additional help in our communities, but we'll make a more detailed announcement on that at the end of the week.