Ambulances Waiting Times

Part of 1. Questions to the First Minister – in the Senedd at 2:15 pm on 14 March 2023.

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Photo of Mark Drakeford Mark Drakeford Labour 2:15, 14 March 2023

My starting point, Llywydd, is always that where there are lessons to be learnt, inside or outside Wales, then of course we would want to learn them. From my long experience of these sorts of discussions—and I don't have this in front of me—what I would suspect would be that there will be different definitions of what is captured by a category 2 response, so we're counting different things, and of course we're counting them on a different geography as well, because a higher a proportion of Wales will be classified as rural areas, with the challenges that come, compared to across the border.

But I can assure the Member that the people who work in our ambulance services are always in contact with people who run ambulance services in England, partly because it is a porous border. The Minister herself is committed to doing that, and the learning is in both directions. We were the first part of the United Kingdom to agree on the current way in which ambulance service performance is measured. That was then subsequently adopted in England. And that's because there is a dialogue, always, between professional workers and officials hoping to see where there are things that can be learnt from one another.