Chamber and committees

How are the booster jags going? [Laughter.]

I know that we need to move on, but that is not the experience of people out there in communities. People who are feeling ill are finding it difficult to get face-to-face appointments.

Some people, but—

What if it is someone in your family who has been trying to get an appointment but cannot get one, who might discover, when they eventually get to the hospital, that they have stage 2 cancer, or whatever, that could have been diagnosed earlier? The issue is coming up again and again: people are struggling.

I understand that a letter was sent from Dr Buist and the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care to GPs, but it is not just about clinical choice; there is a responsibility on the Government. When people feel ill and feel that they need to have a face-to-face appointment with a medical person, it is the responsibility of the Government to ensure that those people can access face-to-face appointments. Surely that is the case, minister?

I will pick up on a couple of things. In the past few weeks, I have met staff and trade union representatives from the front line in our NHS. They would argue that, although the announcement that was made yesterday was welcome, it should have been made earlier and—more important—it does not go far enough when it comes to the resources that are needed. I have had feedback that the pressure is immense. At times, the hospitals are, in the words of the people whom I have met, not safe—the nurse to patient ratio is way beyond what is acceptable. Do you have a grasp of the extent of the problems in our hospitals? Do you accept what those nurses and trade unions are saying about the numbers of nurses being so low in comparison with the numbers of patients that there are serious safety issues in hospitals?

I have raised social care issues with the First Minister and the Deputy First Minister over the past few weeks. We might need to have a much more focused task force, because I am not sure that the capacity to deliver exists within the current management set-ups of the health and social care partnerships. However, that is for another day.

Do you accept that, this winter, more people will die of cancer and other health harms that could have been prevented and that that will be a knock-on effect of Covid? How do you balance the focus on Covid with a focus on other harms in the community?

I note the statement that you made with, I think, Andrew Buist about general practitioners. I know of constituents who were unable to get a GP appointment and, through another route, ended up severely ill at hospital. There are real harms out there. I acknowledge that, before Covid, a massive amount of good work was going on in health centres to triage people—I am not suggesting that we suddenly go back to everyone getting a face-to-face appointment—but there has to be a guarantee for people who feel so ill that they need such an appointment. How will our NHS cope with that? After all, the threat of death now comes not so much from Covid but from the knock-on effect on all the other health ills that have not been dealt with because of the focus on Covid.

Could the committee get an update, and could we have a progress report on the steps that are being taken to make schools safer for kids?

My experience, like yours, has not been bad; I made a phone call, and the doctor at the other end said, “I want to see you.” However, I have examples of family members and others being told, “Just take some antibiotics”, and then ending up at hospital. The advice was completely wrong.

It is a question of clinical judgment. A GP or someone else in the health service might say that they are making a clinical judgment that they cannot see anyone, but given the stories of people being refused an appointment, being told that they can just get antibiotics and then ending up at hospital hours later with something seriously wrong with them—I am sure that there are many such stories; I have certainly seen that happen at first hand—is there not a duty on you to ensure that that does not happen? This is all about getting the balance right, and I am not sure that simply saying that we are not the clinical experts in such matters does that. Surely people should be able to get a face-to-face appointment of some sort if they are so ill that they feel that they need one.

On Tuesday, the First Minister said that the advisory sub-group on education and children’s issues was due to meet and review whether the restrictions in schools should continue unchanged. Did that meeting take place? I might have missed the announcement.

The First Minister said that it might well recommend keeping the mitigations in place for longer but that the group would consider them that afternoon. A lot of parents write to us about those issues.