COLUMNIST

LAST week figures revealed there are now regularly more than one million people visiting A&E departments every year out of a population of just over three million.

The same research also revealed that the numbers waiting more than four hours in A&E has jumped by more than two-thirds (67.5%) in four years.

To put the scale of the problem into perspective, one in seven people in Wales are currently languishing on a waiting list compared to one in 14 in England.

This means people in Wales are now twice as likely as those in England to be on an NHS waiting list for surgery. Of course, there are pressures faced by health services across the UK. Yet these figures suggest it is particularly pronounced in Wales.

Last week I participated in an Assembly debate where members took it in turn to scrutinise the spending priorities proposed by Welsh Government for 2018-19.

I took the opportunity to ask the Cabinet Secretary for Finance Mark Drakeford how – at such a desperate time for the health service, with four health boards facing multimillion-pound deficits and only a real-terms 0.5% budget increase to the Welsh NHS – the situation can improve.

Surely, I put it to the Cabinet Secretary, this paltry rise in spending was barely enough to keep the wheels of the health service from falling off.

As expected, the ghost of austerity was resurrected several times throughout the debate by Labour members, who in a collective state of amnesia ignored the fact that for every £1 spent on NHS users in England, the UK Government has made available £1.20 for their equivalents here in Wales, in my view putting to bed once and for all the decades-old complaint of underfunding.

There were two particular concerns I wanted to raise with the Cabinet Secretary in respect of his plans for the health service.

Firstly, why the lowest percentage share – 7.2% – of the NHS budget in any home nation is borne by Welsh GPs.

People often end up in A&E because they can’t get a GP appointment, partly because of rising demand and partly because more GPs are retiring and practices are unable to fill the vacancies.

Yet GPs are still expected to do the heavy lifting in terms of the prevention of illhealth and the management of chronic illness, so that people don’t end up in need of emergency care. How can GPs be expected to deliver transformational services with such a small slice of the budgetary cake?

Secondly, mental health funding has been ring-fenced for 2018-19, seeing an increase of £20m.

That is a good thing. However, what troubles me is that despite being ring-fenced since 2008, the some health boards have tended to dip into this protected cash to undertake routine treatments.

We need assurances that this chronically underfunded area will not in future be encroached upon to subsidise other areas.

Every year Welsh Labour trot out the same excuses for why healthcare delivery is failing, and point the finger at Westminster.

But with every year of continued Labour rule, this argument grows more threadbare and the buck more heavy to pass.

Angela Burns AM is Welsh Conservative Shadow Health Secretary