1. Will the Cabinet Secretary provide an update on efforts to diversify the dental workforce? OQ61008

Diolch yn fawr. The Welsh Government has long held the view that health professionals should try and work at the top of their licence, allowing others who are appropriately qualified to intervene where appropriate. Until recently, a regulatory issue prevented qualified dental therapists, hygienists and clinical dental technicians from opening and closing NHS courses of dental treatment. This issue has now been resolved, enabling those dental professionals to play a full role in providing NHS care, which will make a difference to the diversity of the dental workforce.

I thank the Cabinet Secretary for that. Llywydd, if we think of general practice these days, more and more we refer to the wider clinical team, those other people with clinical skills who can be part of an effort to provide primary care in communities—practice nurses, physiotherapists and so on. Why has the dental field been so slow to adopt the same approach? Well, it's partly, as the Cabinet Secretary has said, because of regulatory inhibitions; I congratulate her on having put that right. But it also needs to be supplemented by an effort to train more people who can carry out the more routine end of dentistry.

It's certainly not the case that dentists in Wales operate at the top of their clinical licence; far too often, they carry out routine treatments that simply don't need the skills of a fully trained dentist. So, my question for the Cabinet Secretary is: what more can the Welsh Government do to make sure that there is a sufficient supply of other members of that clinical team being trained? How can we use that to grapple with the fact that, too often, the dental profession has a monopoly of supply and uses that to restrict the supply of NHS dentistry in order to promote the chances of more lucrative private practice?

Diolch yn fawr. I know that the former First Minister led the way, when he was the health Minister, in terms of making sure that we use the whole team around primary care, certainly in terms of general medical services, and I'm grateful to you for that. But, you're absolutely right, we haven't seen that pattern develop in quite the same way in relation to dentistry, and that is something that we are determined to address. There was an issue, as I suggested in my answer, where there was a technical issue stopping dental therapists, for example, from opening and closing those NHS courses of treatment. That's now been changed, so there is at least an opportunity now for that door to be opened.

So, the issue then is: where are these dental therapists? Who are they? How do we train them? This was one of the things that I focused on very early in my tenure, because I recognised that, if we fundamentally want to look at the model, then you can't do that without actually providing the numbers. If you're inverting the triangle, you need to make sure that you've got enough people in training. So, certainly, it was an instruction I gave to Health Education and Improvement Wales a couple of years ago, and, certainly, I can assure you that we have doubled the number of dental therapists in training since 2023. So, things are getting better, but we've got a long way to go. 

I'm also really pleased that, the first graduates to qualify from Bangor University's dental hygiene programme, they're also coming on stream. I guess the next challenge for us is to make sure—obviously, we need to increase those numbers, but also to make sure that once they're trained they don't go off to the private sector. That is something that we need to find an answer to as well. 

I have to say that I have great respect for the former First Minister, but I just find it ironic that he's now asking his previous health Minister a question on an area of policy where Welsh Labour has miserably failed, during your tenure.

Now, the people's priorities are for this Welsh Labour Government to provide more dentists in Wales. However, what the previous Welsh Government has overseen is rapid decline in NHS dental services—60 per cent, in fact, decrease in the provision, because of your new contracts. They've done nothing to tackle the reality in Aberconwy that we now have a three-tier system: people who can access private treatment, people who can access NHS treatment and people who are left unable to access either. It's an absolute disgrace, hence my comment about the irony. You've only been out of post, First Minister, a few weeks, and you're asking a question that, really, you should know the answer to. Will the Cabinet Secretary commission a piece of work to model what would be required for you, as the Welsh Government, to deliver full NHS services to all people living in Wales? Diolch yn fawr.

We've made no secret that the challenges around dentistry are real, and we have made efforts, through changing the contract, to address some of those issues, in particular for those people who haven't been able to access NHS dentistry for a long time. And I'm pleased to say that, by today, around 300,000 new NHS patients have been able to access those NHS services. You're quite right, though; I have actually commissioned a piece of work to look at what does this look like over the long term—a 10-year plan—because you can't switch dentists on overnight, you can't even turn dental therapists on overnight, but also you've got to take account of things like the fact that, actually, the population is changing. The population in west Wales, for example, is likely to be slightly older and perhaps need a different kind of dental response from those in other parts of the country. So, all of those things are things that we know need to be addressed. Our current challenge, of course, is one of finance. So, we know what needs to be done, but we are, obviously, financially constrained by the fact that, actually, your UK Government has crashed the economy and given us a poor deal when it comes to money for health.