Part of 2. Questions to the Minister for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:21 pm on 28 June 2023.
Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan
Labour
2:21,
28 June 2023
Thanks very much. I've looked at that report and I think there are a lot of things for us to consider and to act upon. Before we get to stage 4, I think we've got to get to the prevention bit of it, and you heard the announcement yesterday by my colleague. The obesity crisis in Wales—and I'm going to call it a crisis—when you've got 60 per cent of your population who are overweight or obese, you're heading for a very difficult place, and what we know is that that issue is more prevalent in poorer communities, which is why we do have to intervene in order to avoid the kind of situation that you're talking about, in which, then, you see very clearly the disparities between those richer areas and poorer areas in terms of numbers suffering from cancer.
When it comes to the diagnosis, what is clear is that there are parts of Wales that are performing much better than others. It was quite interesting—. If you look at Betsi, Betsi is consistently actually quite good in terms of cancer treatment compared to others. I'm very concerned at the moment, for example, with the performance in Cwm Taf Morgannwg. That's probably one of my biggest headaches at the moment. And we're putting a lot of support into that. We've put them into a special Intervention framework to make sure that we're monitoring what they should do, and we're working with communities to see if we can chase down people who perhaps might not have been taking part in screenings, for example. I know that in relation to colon cancer and things, for example, it's trying to get people to take up that screening facility and working with communities, engaging with them, learning the lessons that we know, and we've learnt a lot of lessons during the pandemic: how do you communicate with people? How do you get into those hard-to-reach places? And I think some of that learning, we've got to now take into all those other areas.
But cancer is absolutely—. I've got six priorities, but now, with the very difficult financial pressures we're under, I have asked the health boards very much to focus on the top three, which are to avoid people going into hospital in the first place, shifting resources into the community, and working with local authorities to avoid delayed transfers of care; secondly, to bring those waiting lists down; and, thirdly, to focus on cancer.
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