What action is the Cabinet Secretary taking to modernise the Welsh NHS?
We are always working to modernise the NHS to ensure people have access to the best possible care and treatment as close to home as possible.
We have a number of national programmes to do just this, including the Six Goals for Urgent and Emergency Care, the Strategic Programme for Primary Care, and the Modernising and Transforming Planned Care programme. All these seek to learn from best practice across healthcare systems and set out policies which either transform or modernise the way in which service is delivered.
Recent examples include the move to NHS 111 as a first point of call for people accessing urgent and emergency care – this replaced the traditional GP out of hours service and now deals with more than 3,000 calls a day.
In planned care, traditional follow-up appointments have been replaced with a self-reporting system for people post-treatment based on their ongoing symptoms and outcomes. This has freed up capacity in outpatients, enabling more new referral to be seen every day.
We continue to seek every opportunity to learn from best practice worldwide to improve NHS services in Wales.
We continue to invest in the NHS – even in the face of unprecedented financial challenges, in 2024-25 we have invested more than 4% in the NHS, compared to less than 1% in England. However, due to the way the UK Government has managed the UK public finances our capital funding has fallen by 8% in real terms since the spending review in 2021.