Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:14 pm on 10 January 2023.
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.