Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:52 pm on 14 December 2022.
Thanks very much. You're absolutely right to highlight the incredible pressure on the emergency services at the moment. As you say, we've seen, this October, the number of red immediately life-threatening calls the highest on record—77 per cent more than in October 2019. This is huge compared to what we've seen before. We have done a huge amount of investment, we've put huge support in place, we've put urgent primary care centres in place, we've rolled out 111, which didn't exist this time last year in north Wales. So, all of those things have actually taken a huge amount of pressure away from accident and emergency, but the demand keeps coming.
Obviously, last weekend, a lot of these—very, very understandably—were parents worried about their children. Certainly, a significant proportion of, for example, the 18,000 calls to NHS 111 were from parents who were worried about children with sore throats. So, we understand what's going on and we understand the pressure. Flow, as we all know, is a significant challenge for us and, as I say, the Deputy Minister and I will be making an announcement on that on Friday along with our local government colleagues.
The issue with beds is actually not the beds but the staffing. That's where the challenge for us constantly is. How do we get the staff in place, and in particular in relation to packages of care that need to be provided by local government? I'm very pleased, now that the budget has come out, that you will see that we have committed once again to honouring the real living wage, and hopefully that should attract more people into the system.
Volunteers are already helping out, but I think it is important that we try and galvanise where we can. What I don't want to do is to ask volunteers to come forward without a very clear plan. So, it does exist, and lots of health boards have these things in place. We've just got to be really careful that we don't raise expectations and then don't follow through. So, a structure is really important. That exists in some health boards, it exists in local government. So, volunteers certainly are helping, but, obviously, we will keep looking at how we can do more in that space.