8. What is the First Minister doing to reduce the need for the outsourcing of patients to private clinics for MRI scans in the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board? OQ61214

Reducing waiting times is a priority for this Government, and we've been clear with health boards that they should utilise all available capacity, including through the independent sector, to reduce waiting times. Our overall objective is to have a genuinely sustainable public national health service.

Thank you. Well, interestingly, in Betsi terms, they call it insourcing of external, you know, procedures. Now, 8,568 patient pathways are waiting over 105 weeks, two years, to start treatment, and that's 3,600 per cent more than the whole of England. Now, in an effort to combat this crisis, the health board did turn to insourcing, using private companies. They've been entering contracts with external healthcare providers to provide clinical teams to attend health board sites, see patients and also undertake a number of results from scans. Now, this has only just come to my attention, but, due to funding pressure, the health board recently—. I have constituents waiting several months for scan results. Now, surely, First Minister, you can understand that, anybody going for a scan, it's a worrying time for them; anybody waiting for those results, it's even more worrying. And when those results don't come through, it just causes an additional burden of stress and anxiety. Now, what has happened is, due to funding pressures, the health board made a decision to halt the insourcing of external services on scans with effect from April 2023, a year ago. However, rather than bring in those patients back under the NHS umbrella—

I've been very patient. Please get to a question, Janet Finch-Saunders.

Yes. So, basically, those patients were then just left in abeyance for months and months and months at a time. Now, they've written to me saying—

The question now, please, Janet.

Yes, okay. So, what will you do, working with the health Minister, First Minister, to ensure that you look exactly at how the insourcing of external programmes is working? Because to actually stop it for a year and it not be picked up is disgraceful. I want to make sure that doesn't happen again.

Two minutes is sufficient for the question there.

I think, as the Member acknowledged, insourcing is where people are brought into the NHS to deliver some of the scans that are required, and our challenge is, if we want to generate the capacity we need, we need to invest in people and in equipment to do that. And we need to utilise parts of the independent sector to make sure that we don't have unacceptable waits within the system. And in fact, on MRI scans in the last year, there has been about a 30 per cent reduction in people waiting longer than our expectation, so it has made a difference. And that reduction in people waiting has actually taken place despite there being a 14 per cent increase in demand. Now, I know there has been an issue and some people were missed for follow-up. That's something the Cabinet Secretary is aware of. It's also something the health board are aware of. They've reviewed all of those cases to make sure people are put back into the system where they should have been. Part of our challenge is not just in saying what we want to do to recognise there is a problem we need to resolve; it is also, where things go wrong, about whether you are prepared to put it right. That's exactly what has happened in this instance. And we're going to need to invest more in this area to get to a point of being genuinely sustainable, and then we need to find a way to carry on investing in more preventative healthcare as well. That's the challenge we face. I understand it very well as a former health Minister. The Cabinet Secretary for health understands that very well and that is exactly what she is doing: getting on top of long waits and looking to shift our system to more preventative healthcare.

Finally, question 9, Delyth Jewell.