The Welsh NHS is broken and I don’t say that lightly.
For 26 years, Labour Welsh Governments have run the Welsh NHS in perpetuity. As a result, we’ve seen waiting lists hit record highs for ten consecutive months. The previous Health Minister for Wales, Baroness Eluned Morgan, is now the First Minister. She promised to eliminate the very longest waits of two years or more, by March 2023 and then again by March 2024 when that target was not hit.
Where do we stand now? Has that crucial target been met? No, far from it.
Wales still has well over 24,000 on the two year plus waiting list. In England, the equivalent figure is only 150 in a population nearly twenty times the size. The disparity is enormous and simply isn’t good enough. For the most serious ambulance calls, category red, you have less than a 50/50 chance of receiving a response within the target time.
I saw these issues up close when I accepted an opportunity to observe an ambulance crew for a twelve-hour shift. I wanted to see first-hand what the issues were and what I saw was astonishing. Handover delays at emergency departments was causing a backlog of ambulances parked outside of one of Wales’ major hospitals, the Grange. It was shocking to see as many as 15 of them effectively out of commission, waiting and unable to proceed to the next call.
This is such a regular occurrence that they’ve installed fans to blow away the diesel fumes. This cannot continue.
That’s why I was perplexed to hear Mark Drakeford, the former First Minister of Wales who now holds the purse strings to the Welsh NHS as Finance Minister, say that Wales has “too many hospitals and too many beds”. He’s wrong, we need to see more beds and for Labour to build the hospitals that they have routinely promised at elections.
But this won’t be enough. That’s why I was proud to take on the role of Shadow Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care.
The latter is essential, because if we don’t fix social care, rewarding workers and boosting capacity, then we will not improve patient flow and we will never fix the Welsh NHS. The issue, despite what Labour says, certainly isn’t funding from Westminster, because historically Wales has received £1.20 per head for every £1 spent on health in England.
In my new role shadowing the health brief, I’m determined to hold Labour to account for their atrocious failure to manage the Welsh NHS properly, but to also put forward constructive solutions to fix it.
We need to look seriously at the governance structure of the Welsh NHS. People across the UK will agree that we’ve had excessive growth in the number of middle managers at the expense of much-needed doctors and nurses on the frontline. It may not be popular with some in Labour and Plaid Cymru, but the Welsh Conservatives are clear that we need to see more cross-community, cross-sector and yes, cross-border treatment.
The people of Wales are on our side. I don’t think patients will mind having to travel a little further for their operation if it shaves weeks off their wait that they would otherwise have to endure, often in pain. We’ve got to utilise capacity where we can to bear down on these extraordinarily excessive waiting times and end this crisis.
I was relieved to hear the news that week that Powys Teaching Health Board, the body that oversees the Welsh NHS that covers rural Mid Wales and my constituency, has dropped plans to artificially increase cross-border treatment waits to cut costs. Under the original proposals, patients would have had to wait up to 11 weeks longer, on top of the record waits they were already experiencing.
The problem isn’t the staff in the Welsh NHS who work tirelessly under strenuous and stressful conditions. The problem isn’t even the executives who felt they needed to put forward these damaging proposals. Places like Brecon and Radnorshire are an afterthought for Labour Ministers in Cardiff Bay. Labour has failed to address regional health inequalities with rural areas neglected in favour of metropolitan centres.
Likewise, we haven’t seen a recruitment and retention plan that the Welsh NHS desperately needs. I would make that a priority, because we need more doctors and nurses, not more politicians which seems to be the top priority of Labour Ministers, costing the taxpayer £120 million. The Welsh Conservatives will not rest until Labour is turfed out of office and we can implement our plan to fix the Welsh NHS.
Rest assured that while under Labour, Wales is broken, the Welsh Conservatives are determined to fix it.