3. Will the Cabinet Secretary make a statement on the Welsh Government's progress in tackling NHS waiting lists? OQ61025

Latest figures show six of seven health boards have hit the target to ensure 97 per cent of all waits are less than 104 weeks. The number of pathways waiting for more than two years fell again for the twenty-third month in a row. The average waiting time is now around 21 weeks.

Thank you for your response, Cabinet Secretary. I recently spoke with Together for Short Lives and Tŷ Hafan about the critical support they provide to children with life-changing illnesses, as well as their families. This care is predominantly centred around palliative care and provides invaluable respite and support for families at some of the most difficult moments imaginable. Tŷ Hafan and Together for Short Lives have outlined their need for further funding to cater for a much needed boost in the number of community children nurses, and have previously called for funding to cover 21 per cent of their costs, despite only currently receiving between 5 per cent and 10 per cent from the Welsh Government to cover this critical service. This is understandably impacting the number of patients these organisations are able to reach. At the moment, the figure stands at one in 10 children in Wales who are getting the critical care that they and their families so desperately need and want. So, Cabinet Secretary, as I'm sure you can appreciate, this has a knock-on effect on our NHS, meaning that nine out of 10 of these children are, therefore, going to be put on a waiting list. So, with this in mind, Cabinet Secretary, what plans do you have to improve access to care in the community for critically ill children across Wales, which will in tandem alleviate this pressure on our NHS waiting lists? Thank you.

Thanks very much, Natasha, and you're quite right that it's probably the most difficult area of all and an area that I'm absolutely committed to addressing. That's why, in the past month, I have given an extra £4 million to hospices in Wales. Let's not forget that, in hospices, the vast majority of the work is done in the community. Certainly, on a visit to St David's Hospice with my colleague Jayne Bryant a few months ago, it really came home to me how much of that work is done in the community. We recognised that, whilst many of the experts who work in this field—and you can imagine the kind of expertise you need in that role, and you've got to be a pretty robust person to be able to work in that very, very challenging space—. One of the challenges was that, actually, we'd given a pay rise to those working in the NHS, but we hadn't given a commensurate pay rise to those working in hospices. So, we hope that the £4 million will go some way towards addressing that issue. I met with those hospices a couple of weeks ago, and I know they were very grateful for that additional funding.

The Cabinet Secretary said in an interview with the PA news agency recently,

'What we’ve been trying to do is to concentrate on the longest waiters.'

Should she be concentrating on the longest waiters or, in fact, should she be concentrating on those in greatest need?

Thanks very much. The fact is, we've been—. If you look at the overall numbers who need support, we are talking about hundreds of thousands of people. So, how do you prioritise those? You're absolutely right—we have to look at the most urgent cases. The question for me is, if you balance off and if you look at the experts who say what percentage, more or less, are in the urgent bracket, most health boards are categorising far too many as urgent cases, which means that those people who are waiting longest, sometimes with quite complex cases, are put on 'never' lists, and that is not an acceptable situation, which is why one of the things I've been doing is spending a huge amount of time really chasing down those people who've been on very long waiting lists, unacceptably long, waiting in pain. Of course, urgent cases always go to the front of the queue, but there are too many of them jumping the queue at the expense of those people who've been on the waiting lists for a very, very long time.