5. What is the Welsh Government doing to shorten waiting times in the health service in South Wales West? OQ58932

We are committed to reducing waiting times across the whole of Wales, investing £170 million recurrently to support improvement, and £15 million to support transformation of services. October data demonstrates that waits over two years have reduced by 26 per cent since March 2022 at the Swansea Bay health board. 

Diolch, Brif Weinidog. A constituent of mine from Morriston has been suffering with knee problems for 15 years, and has been waiting for five years, almost to the day, for two partial knee replacements, being in constant pain the whole time, and having had to give up her pub as a result. When I highlighted my constituent's case in a letter to Swansea Bay University Health Board, they said that waiting times for orthopaedic surgery in Swansea are now in excess of four years. I'm sorry it doesn't fit in with your understanding of the situation, but they also pointed to historic under-resourcing of orthopaedic surgery. The fact that there have been two questions this afternoon on the same issue from Members in South Wales West shows how full our inboxes are of these cases.

Yes, Westminster's underfunding of Wales and Tory cuts to public services are obviously a massive part of the problem here, but health is a Welsh Government responsibility. So, will the First Minister pledge in 2023 to acknowledge his own Government's agency and responsibility, and tell us what he's going to do to ensure the people of Wales, including my constituent, are properly looked after from cradle to grave and not left in pain and despair for years?

I've already set out this afternoon a series of things that the Welsh Government is doing to make sure that the health service is in a position to treat people in a timely way. That is our ambition, and I'm sure it's the ambition of Members across the Chamber. As I've said, two-year waits in the Swansea Bay health board were 26 per cent lower at the end of October than they were at the end of March last year. That does demonstrate that progress is being made, albeit that there are people waiting longer than we would wish. I pointed out in my answer to Altaf Hussain that the board itself has a plan to concentrate planned orthopaedic surgery in Port Talbot hospital, being able to protect that capacity for that purpose, while retaining 10 beds at Morriston for those more complex cases. That separation of planned and emergency care is something that we've talked about regularly on the floor of the Senedd, and this is an example, and there are other examples in other parts of Wales, of the effort that the health service is making to separate those two streams in its work to be able to protect elective capacity and therefore to be able to make progress on those long waits in a way that will, I hope, bring relief to Sioned Williams's constituent.