Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 6:05 pm on 25 January 2023.
Okay. It would be useful to know which health board, but, anyway, I'm sure you can tell the Minister after this debate. I really think that both the Conservatives and Plaid, who say they want to find more money to pay the nurses, need to say which bit of our budget we are going to raid in order to do that, unless there is movement from the UK Government who control the purse strings.
Now, a more important debate took place last Thursday here in the Senedd on Thursday evening, which the Minister was present at, as was I, as was Joyce Watson, as were several other Members. That was a grown-up debate, except that I was delighted to meet Katja Empson, who is a consultant in emergency medicine at the Heath hospital here in Cardiff, because it enabled me to say to her, to ask her, 'Why is it that Cardiff has been able to stop all these ambulances queuing up outside the hospital when other hospitals don't seem to have been able to do that? What is it that you've done that's different?' She gave me a really excellent answer about how it was really important to see the people waiting in the ambulances as part of the patients that they needed to treat, who were just as important as the people inside the building. So, that was owning the problem, which is that there were a lot of sick people outside who needed to come in. So, what did they do? It's a whole-system approach across the hospital to ensure that people are going through into the wards, where appropriate, and then leaving them when they've finished their medical treatment. She said that that is happening in Cardiff and it's not happening elsewhere. So, when I asked that question in the Q&A after the panel had spoken—'Why are other hospitals not actually achieving what Cardiff has achieved?'—he then passed me over to Katja Empson again. I already knew the answer and what she had to say. What I hadn't heard was what all the others might have said, who were from Bangor, from Wrexham and from the Princess of Wales and elsewhere.
I had a much better answer from the head of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine, who appeared before the health committee in the House of Commons yesterday morning. When he was asked that very same question—. No, not the same question; he was asked, 'Why are there so many people overrunning the emergency departments across the UK?' He said there are far too many people being sent to hospital or turning up at the emergency departments who don't need to be there. That resonates with me with some of the things I want to see happening, which is the roll-out of the neighbourhood nursing teams, inspired by Buurtzorg. I understand that, only today, the national specification for community nursing was published, which is part of a strategic programme for rolling it out across Wales. It's happening all too slowly. The only really positive thing about this—