Good afternoon, First Minister.

2. What action is the Welsh Government taking to eliminate multi-year waits for NHS treatment? OQ58907

Good afternoon to Dr Hussain. Llywydd, in the six months following publication of the planned care recovery programme, long waits in the Welsh NHS have fallen by 23 per cent. That is the result of significant additional investment, expanded facilities, service reform and, most of all, the enormous effort of NHS staff themselves.

Thank you very much, First Minister. Of course, we all acknowledge the tremendous stress our NHS is currently under, but multi-year waits have been around since well before the pandemic, especially in orthopaedics. One of my constituents has been waiting for a total knee replacement since 2019. He has been waiting in agony for three and a half years, and all the local health board can tell me is that the waiting list is over four years' long and that the patient should see his GP to manage the pain. First Minister, do you agree with me that it is totally unacceptable that patients should wait that long, or that secondary care should be placing these additional burdens on an already over-stretched primary care sector? I remember raising similar questions during my first term in the Senedd, and yet, here we are nearly a decade later having the same old discussion about orthopaedics. First Minister, when will Welsh patients finally get the service they deserve?

Llywydd, I don't accept the general picture that the Member paints, of this being a condition that has always been a problem in the Welsh NHS. Waiting times in the Welsh NHS had been falling for four and five years in a row up until March of 2019 and beyond. It is the impact of the pandemic that has built up those lengthy waiting lists, in every part of the United Kingdom. As I said in my original answer, long waits, the longest waits in the Welsh NHS, fell by 23 per cent between the end of March and the end of October of last year, and that includes gains in orthopaedics, which is one of the most difficult specialities to see a way of resolving the backlog and increasing activity, because of the impact that COVID continues to have, in the way that operating theatres and other procedures are carried out in the Welsh NHS. Of course we want to see those waits brought down further, and, while people are waiting, I think there is a role for primary care clinicians in helping people to manage their conditions in the best way possible.

In Swansea Bay particularly, the Member will be aware that the health board is intending to concentrate planned orthopaedic care in the Neath Port Talbot Hospital, freeing up capacity at Morriston, retaining 10 beds in Morriston for the most complex cases, and, in doing so, to have dedicated beds that will allow even more procedures to be resumed as fast as possible.

First Minister, do you agree with me that it takes some front for a Conservative to criticise the national health service? One of the issues we've seen over the last decade has been how austerity has ripped the heart out of our public services. Brexit ripped the heart out of our economy. What we need to do to celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of Aneurin Bevan establishing the national health service is to provide it with the sort of funds it requires in order to deliver for people today and in the future. That means that you need to be absolutely crystal clear in your next meeting with the Prime Minister: austerity has failed for a decade, it's not going to succeed in the next decade, and if we want to see the national health service succeeding as it has, and as Aneurin Bevan wanted it to do, then we need to invest in it for now and the future.

I thank Alun Davies for that question, Llywydd. He reminds us of how fiercely Aneurin Bevan was opposed by the Conservative Party at the time. There never would have been a national health service had that party had its way. Where he is certainly true is this: Llywydd, if you look at satisfaction levels with the national health service, they were at their height in the year 2010, and they've been at their lowest in recent months. Why is that? It's because, in 2010, there had been a decade of investment in our public services. The level of investment in our NHS had reached the level that was available in our European neighbours. A decade of austerity has eroded all of those gains. It lies at the root of the difficulties that we currently face—the difficulties we face with people feeling obliged to go on strike to express their dissatisfaction at the impact that pay held back over a decade has had on their lives, and we see it in the investment that has been available across the United Kingdom to keep that service in good order. I'll certainly make that point when I next see the Prime Minister, but it's a point we make more generally to people across the United Kingdom: this country needs a Government prepared to invest in the NHS and to repair the damage done by the last 12 years.