Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:52 pm on 18 January 2023.
Diolch yn fawr, Llywydd. I wasn't exactly sure what Plaid Cymru hoped to achieve by getting the Welsh Government to declare a health crisis in Wales, so, I am pleased that I now know the three main points of what you wanted us to focus on, and I am grateful for those. So, one of them was to help focus minds on finding innovative ways to address the problems we face, focus all our spending powers on the issues that matter, and the main one is resolving pay disputes and also to look at Government structures.
Let me just take some of those in order. First of all, finding innovative ways to address the problems we face—we are doing that. We’ve got £144 million in the regional integration fund that does precisely that—looks for innovative ways of doing things. And then, the whole point for me is that you have to then scale up what works. So, for example, we’re looking in an innovative way at the way Cardiff is dealing with their A&E long waits at the moment, and it’s quite successful, and now we’re trying to scale that up and take it across the whole of Wales. We’ve got this new community bed capacity—that, again, is an innovative approach. And I’ve said time and again that the six goals for urgent and emergency care are really starting to bite: we have a whole load of measures this year that weren’t in place last year.
I was really fascinated to hear about the Government structures. I’m not sure if, in the middle of a very difficult time, restructuring is a good idea. We are absolutely focused on the job in hand, but what I will tell you is that I do accept that we do need to have a more comprehensive debate at a time when we know that care is becoming more complex and we have an ageing population.