The first minster is taking questions from party leaders on topics that matter to the people of Wales. Starting with Andrew RT Davies, who is concerned over recent stories of drastically long waiting times within the Welsh NHS, and he wants to know what is being done about it.
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00:00 and that the ambulance service is having more resource to meet the demand.
00:07 All very welcome, but as Health Inspectorate Wales highlighted in their annual report,
00:12 they cannot find any evidence of improvements in the service.
00:16 That's their words, not mine.
00:18 The NHS in Wales cares for hundreds of thousands of patients every year.
00:23 And within them, many have decent experiences,
00:25 but many have very poor experiences in hospitals and the care sector.
00:29 For example, Theresa Jones, a 91-year-old woman who, according to her family,
00:33 waited 24 hours for an ambulance after falling in her care home in Port Talbot.
00:37 And BBC journalist Jeremy Bowen's 86-year-old mother,
00:40 who spent a full day sat on a plastic chair waiting in the Heath hospital with a severe chest infection.
00:45 These may be outliers, but these are real experiences,
00:48 and Andrew R.T. Davies thinks the people of Wales deserve better.
00:51 I've listed two experiences of two elderly individuals here.
00:57 I'm not asking you to comment about the individual experience.
01:01 I'm asking you to reflect on the delivery of the service
01:06 and how the government, of which you are head of,
01:10 is making sure that these improvements are being fed through.
01:14 If he wants a proper answer to his question,
01:16 then I think he would recognise that the fundamental issue
01:20 with both the ambulance service and A&E departments
01:23 doesn't lie either in that service or in that department.
01:26 It lies in the fact that so many people are in our hospitals in Wales
01:31 who do not need to be in a hospital,
01:34 but could be cared for successfully elsewhere,
01:37 but where those services struggle to meet the demand for move-on.
01:42 So we have many, many hundreds of people
01:46 clinically fit to be looked after elsewhere
01:49 who are in a hospital bed.
01:51 What's happened in Port Talbot and the steelworks could be devastating for the whole town.
01:55 Discussions are still ongoing about other alternatives to the current plan
01:59 to cut the 2,800 jobs.
02:01 The Welsh Government have spoken about their options
02:03 and they believe more jobs can be saved,
02:05 keeping much of the steelworks site open
02:07 and moving to a greener way of producing steel.
02:10 But does the First Minister agree with me
02:12 that supporting a just transition is a principle
02:15 that should be equally important to the agriculture sector too?
02:20 That there is a credible alternative plan
02:22 to the one that the company itself has so far put on the table.
02:27 We expect over the weeks ahead
02:29 that that credible plan will receive the attention that it needs and deserves
02:35 and that an alternative future,
02:37 an alternative path to that future that Port Talbot has of green steelmaking
02:43 should be agreed between the trade unions, the community and the company itself
02:50 and the Welsh Government will certainly play our part in that.
02:54 The First Minister will only be hearing about issues like these for a few more weeks
02:58 and will these problems look to well outlast Mark Drakeford and his tenure.
03:01 David Watkins reporting from Wales.
03:04 (water splashing)