Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:59 pm on 10 January 2023.
Well, Llywydd, I think it was the BMA that described the Welsh NHS as the NHS closest to the founding Bevanite principles of the health service of any of the four UK nations, and that is a position that I would wish to see us maintain. The impact of the pandemic meant that we have made greater use of private sector facilities than we would have prior to that, and there was no criticism of that, as I remember, during the pandemic period, because we needed to use all the facilities that we could put our hands on to make sure that people suffering from coronavirus had the treatment that they needed. In the aftermath of COVID, we will be making use of some private sector facilities to erode the backlog of people waiting for care that we talked about earlier this afternoon. Actually, I make no apologies for doing that. I regard it as a short-term measure to deal with a backlog. But when we have a backlog of the sort that we have seen—and we've heard this afternoon about people waiting in pain to get the treatment that they need—I make no apology for the fact that we will use facilities in the private sector here in Wales in that short-term way to erode those backlogs. At the same time, we want to build up the capacity of the health service itself, so that in the long run it is able to provide for all the needs that are there in Wales within the public service.