Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 1:37 pm on 7 March 2023.
First Minister, I'm sure you will want to celebrate the work of Cardiff and Vale health board, mindful of the well-being of their staff, and inviting them to take part in courses on how to grow vegetables on the Llandough hospital site, obviously funded by the Cardiff and Vale health board charity—something, I'm sure, close to both our hearts. But I also want to highlight their recent work on tackling the enduring epidemic of mental illness. Referrals to secondary care remain almost as high as they were during the pandemic. So, they've been training barbers to recognise signs of mental distress amongst their customers, and they're training people with lived experience of enduring mental health problems as tutors, to work alongside professional clinical tutors, involving individual patients and families and friends in a whole-system recovery, through something called the recovery college. How can this really creative response to the shortage of applicants to fill staff vacancies be deepened across Government, to help shrink the disparity in the numbers of years lived well between different socioeconomic groups, so harshly exposed by COVID? In Cardiff, it's 12 years.