Good afternoon conference.
What a great day we Welsh Conservatives are having here in Cardiff…
…setting out our agenda to strengthen devolution and to build a prosperous Wales within a successful United Kingdom.
In opening this final session of today I want to pay tribute to the hard work, professionalism and commitment of our NHS workforce in Wales.
They are the backbone of the health service delivering high quality care in our hospitals, our surgeries and our communities every hour of every day across the country.
But their efforts are being undermined.
Labour has been running the NHS in Wales since 1999, but they are running it into the ground.
In fact, Wales has a record-breaking Welsh Labour Government:
- Record-breaking NHS budget cuts
- Record-breaking numbers of patients left languishing for more than 36 weeks waiting for treatment
- Record-breaking lows in ambulance service performance against life-threatening calls
- and record-breaking numbers of patients spending 12 hours or more in Welsh emergency departments!
Carwyn Jones and Ed Miliband should hang their heads in shame!
Conference, it pains me to say it, but under Labour in Wales our NHS is in crisis.
It’s no wonder that recent polls have found that patient satisfaction in Wales is lower than in England and Scotland.
In spite of Labour’s pre-election promises, we’ve seen hospitals closed and downgraded, minor injuries units axed and services being withdrawn from the communities which rely upon them.
One in five hospital beds have gone, causing chaos in our emergency departments as hardworking staff try to manage the consequences.
Poor workforce planning by Labour Ministers and uncertainty over the future of NHS services has led to a recruitment crisis.
Performance targets are missed, month in, month out, with little sign of improvement.
You know, when he became First Minister there were 187,000 on an NHS waiting list in Wales…
...today that figure has ballooned to over 417,000 - more than the population of Cardiff!
And with one in seven people in Wales now on an NHS waiting list you can understand why some have dubbed it the ‘National Waiting Service’.
Death rates, cancer waits, diagnostic tests...the statistics go on, and on, and on...and up, and up, and up!
It cannot go on!
NHS Commission
Against this backdrop of failure and lacklustre performance, it is no wonder that the Welsh Labour Government are looking for new ideas.
This week I received a letter from Labour’s Health Minister Mark Drakeford inviting the Welsh Conservatives to take part in a Commission on the future of the NHS in Wales.
It took the Minister almost two weeks to extend an invitation to participate in the commission…
…even though he has been discussing the idea for many months with the Lib-Dems…
…you remember them don’t you…the Lib Dems…there aren’t many in Wales these days!
Anyway, the Minister says he wants a cross-party commission, with an independent chair, and that it should not be made up exclusively of political party nominees.
He wants it to start work in April and complete its work by May of next year.
Now, whilst I’m all for working together to solve the crisis in our NHS I’m afraid that I cannot accept the Minister’s invitation.
Given the proposals for extra members there are insufficient safeguards that the Commission will be truly politically balanced and the timescales for its work are far too long and drawn out.
Conference, a Commission is a second best option.
Instead the Welsh Government should heed our calls, and those of Ann Clwyd, the British Medical Association, the North Wales Community Health Council and others for an independent inquiry into the health service here in Wales…
…to get to the bottom of the problems in our NHS and come up with solutions we can implement.
If they had listened to us two years ago, we’d already have the answers and have implemented the solutions we need.
Patient Voice, Choice and Access
When we met in Llangollen last year, I made a number of announcements which sought to address the problems in our National Health Service here in Wales.
I spoke about our big ideas for the NHS in Wales.
Big ideas to give patients a greater voice in NHS decision making, more choice in the treatment they receive, and greater access to the services they depend on:
to bring an end to the system of political patronage which allows Welsh Labour Ministers to appoint decision makers onto local health boards and to replace it with directly elected Health Commissioners
to extend patient rights through a Patients Choice Charter
- Rights to choose a GP
- Rights to choose which hospital you are referred to for appointment
- Rights to choose to transfer your care if you’ve been waiting too long for treatmen
and to improve access to treatment through
- 100 new recruits to the Welsh Ambulance Servic
- And the end of the postcode lottery for cancer treatment through the establishment of a Welsh Cancer Treatments Fund
These three things - Patient Voice, Patient Choice and Patient Access - are at the very heart of our vision for the future of our health service…
…and put an end to unpopular and unnecessary hospital reconfiguration…
…but they can only be delivered against a backdrop of patients, health boards and Government accepting responsibility for the part that they play in contributing to the success of our NHS.
So today, I want to speak to you about responsibility - Patient Responsibility, Health Board Responsibility and Government Responsibility for our health service.
Patient Responsibility
We all have a right to use the National Health Service but we must do so responsibly.
But Conference, there are some in society who take our National Health Service for granted and waste its precious resources.
In recent years the Welsh Ambulance Service has reported that it received calls from:
A man who claimed he had drunk too much wine called 999 complaining of a terrible hangover.
A woman who asked a 999 operator what she should do with her baby, because her husband was in work
A man who dialled 999 because he had the hiccups
A woman who dropped a television remote control and needed someone to pick it up
They also revealed that one household in North Wales had made 290 999 calls for ambulances in a 12 month period.
You couldn’t make it up!
Then there are our emergency departments which regularly see drink and drug fuelled abuse and attacks against NHS staff.
Whilst hundreds of incidents are recorded each year, hundreds more go unreported and are tolerated by staff who are firefighting the pressures in our hospitals.
This sort of abuse cannot go unpunished…
…it puts lives at risk and directs resources away from those in real need of attention.
That’s why today I can confirm that a Welsh Conservative Government would work with the UK Government…
…to introduce a system of tougher penalties and fines for perpetrators of abuse and attacks against NHS workers.
And we’ll also deal with smoking on the NHS estate by introducing fixed penalties for those who smoke on hospital grounds.
Then we have the issue of missed appointments.
An inquiry last year by the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee has established that patients fail to turn up for more than one in ten GP appointments, some 600,000 per year
…and that one in nine hospital outpatient appointments, 350,000 are missed annually…
…costing the public purse at least £30 million each year.
Now I accept that some people who miss appointments do so through no fault of their own, but the reality is that many do not.
Missing an appointment doesn’t just waste the time of doctors and nurses and have potentially harmful outcomes for those who fail to turn up…
…it also deprives other patients of an opportunity to get their appointment wastes taxpayers’ money and keeps waiting lists longer than they should be.
Text message and email reminders are some of the innovations that can help, but these are not enough.
Wales must to get to grips with this problem.
So I can reveal today that a Welsh Conservative Government in Cardiff Bay would undertake a pilot of charging irresponsible patients who miss NHS appointments.
Of course, some GP appointments are made simply to access free prescriptions for inexpensive over the counter products such as paracetamol, mouth ulcer gels and athlete’s foot powder.
While the cost of a packet of paracetamol can be as little as 20 pence in a supermarket, the cost of a GP appointment and a prescription for paracetamol can be in excess of £40 – it’s ridiculous.
So in a further bid to promote responsible patient behaviour, we will not only scrap Labour’s prescriptions policy which entitles millionaires to free paracetamol but denies cancer patients life-prolonging drugs…
… we will also require the costs of prescriptions to be printed on labels of NHS dispensed medicines.
Health Board Responsibility
But it’s not just patients who need to behave responsibly, Health Boards do too, particularly when it comes to decision-making.
In North Wales proposals to downgrade maternity services by axing doctor-led care at Glan Clwyd Hospital have met with outrage from local residents.
The Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board developed its proposals in secret without any consultation with the local community health council, frontline staff, the public or their elected representatives.
The plans will put the lives of mothers and babies at risk and have been criticised by doctors and midwives.
It’s no wonder that 15,000 people signed a petition within days of the plans being made public!
Well I have a message for the Health Board…
…it’s not good enough…
…scrap your decision…
…get back to the drawing board and come up with another solution!
Conference, these things are happening elsewhere in Wales too…
…Withybush, Prince Philip and the Royal Glamorgan hospitals have all seen services axed or downgraded.
Healthcare arrangements in Wales have also come under pressure in recent years as a result of the slate-curtain which Welsh Labour has tried to draw between England and Wales.
Traditional patient flows between North Wales and the north West of England and Mid-Wales and the Midlands have been disrupted as health boards have sought to redirect patients to Welsh hospitals…
…forcing patients to wait longer and travel further for treatment.
A Welsh Conservative Government would put an end to this nonsense.
In addition to our proposals for directly elected Health Commissioners…
…we would require Health Boards to plan healthcare across the England and Wales border…
…and give Welsh patients a right to be treated at their nearest appropriate hospital – even if that hospital is in England.
Government Responsibility
So patients have a moral duty to use the NHS responsibly and Health Boards must be more responsible in planning patient care, but what of the Welsh Government’s responsibilities.
Under Labour Wales has become the ‘Sick man of Britain’ lagging behind on key NHS indicators and we all know why...
...Labour’s record-breaking health cuts.
While Labour Ministers spent millions in unplanned expenditure nationalising an airport…
…thousands of patients across Wales saw operations cancelled as health boards tried to make ends meet.
While Labour Ministers spent millions refurbishing their offices and hundreds of thousands on potted plants…
...NHS staff struggled to cope with demand in our emergency departments.
It’s a national disgrace!
You can’t take hundreds of millions from a health service for 3 million people and not expect it to have an impact.
It is clear that decisions to cut NHS spending, which have been supported by the Lib-Dems and Plaid, are taking their toll and disadvantaging Welsh patients.
And don’t just take my word for it. The Nuffield Trust has concluded:
‘Waiting times in Wales have been increasing…the decision to cut, rather than maintain NHS spending in real terms may have affected them’
They went on to say:
‘comparing England, Scotland and Wales…waiting times for common procedures appear to be lengthening disproportionately in Wales.’
The Trust found that average wait for hip and knee replacements in Wales was 170 days compared with around 70 days in England and Scotland.
The Wales Audit Office has warned of evidence that patients are coming to harm as a result of long waiting times.
It highlighted concerns that cardiac patients in South Wales were coming to harm due to excessive waits with higher death rates, poorer outcomes and greater pressure on emergency departments as a result.
The RNIB has also warned that 48 patients per year are losing their sight as a result in waits for ophthalmology appointments.
It’s a disgrace!
From this evidence it is abundantly clear that it is patients who are paying the price of Labour’s record-breaking NHS cuts in Wales.
Yet whenever anything goes wrong in the Welsh NHS we see Labour Ministers playing the blame game…
…’it’s up to Health Boards to deliver against targets’, they say
…’it’s winter pressures’
…’it’s austerity cuts’
…they even wheel out their favourite former Prime Minister ‘Margaret Thatcher’ as an excuse for failing to deliver!
Well I’ve got a message for the Welsh Labour Party…
…neither Margaret Thatcher or David Cameron has ever cut an NHS budget…
…shame on you for cutting yours!
It’s the Welsh Labour Government who hold the purse strings of the health service; it is Labour Ministers who set performance targets.
It’s time they took responsibility for their actions; reversed their NHS cuts and gave the health service the funding it so desperately needs.
Conclusion
So Conference, there you have it, our vision for a Welsh NHS with Patient Voice, Patient Choice and Patient Access at its core…
…a health service where patients, Health Boards and the Welsh Government all take responsibility for ensuring its success.
Let's keep on fighting the good fight for the sake of patients the length and breadth of Wales…
And each do our bit to get the message out and secure the victory we need in the General Election in May.
Let's get out there with a spring in our step and win for Wales.
Thank you.