RHUN AP IORWERTH

COLUMNIST

THE issue of NHS staff and workforce planning continues to dominate our thinking in Plaid Cymru.

Our long-standing warnings of the “demographic time bomb” in the primary care workforce appear to be manifesting themselves, with last month’s figures showing the lowest number of GPs working in Wales for over 10 years.

But it isn’t just about the doctors that concerns are raised.

Nursing numbers have been hitting the headlines recently and although many of those reports refer to the situation in England, those concerns have been raised about Wales in some contexts.

The cabinet secretary for health, Vaughan Gething, wrote to all Assembly Members at the end of last month regarding a claim of falling nurse numbers at Betsi Cadwaladr – a claim based on freedom of information data – on why this claim was wrong.

Now, we’ve looked into the figures used by the Welsh Government from Stats Wales and can confirm the Welsh Government’s claim in the letter is accurate.

The figures do show that between September 2015 and 2017, Betsi Cadwaladr has seen a small increase in qualified nurses, midwives and health visitors.

However, if we choose September 2014 as the starting point, then the same Stats Wales figures would show a decline in the number of full-time equivalent nurses in Betsi Cadwaladr compared with September 2017.

A cynic might conclude that the Welsh Government deliberately chose September 2015 as their starting point.

Let me now turn to figures from the Nursing and Midwifery Council.

Incidentally, they show EU nurses leaving the UK in droves because of concerns over Brexit – which is hugely worrying.

But looking at their general Welsh data, we see that there are over 300 fewer nurses living in Wales than in 2012-13.

The same cynic might say that what I did there was to pick a starting point to suit my narrative, and of course the cynic might have a point.

I am simply demonstrating how statistics in isolation can be misused and how we should examine all the sources to come to a balanced conclusion. So in pursuit of that balance, I’ll turn to the Royal College of Nursing.

They say: “Overall numbers of employed NHS nurses are static. This does not reflect increased patient numbers, higher patient dependency and higher bed occupancy.

“The overall numbers can also obscure very sharp shortages of registered nurses and nursing in some specific fields, eg neonatal nursing and children’s nursing in the community.”

This is fair, balanced... and of course it paints a worrying picture.

We also know that the Welsh NHS continues to demonstrate a heavy reliance on nurses working overtime.

Some 71% of nurses work overtime at least once a week – that’s almost 16,000 nurses having to go over and above the call of duty every week because of understaffing.

Plaid Cymru wants the Welsh Government to address that and not waste ministerial time with rows over whether their interpretation of Stats Wales data is more accurate than ours, as we seek to scrutinise them.

■ Rhun ap Iorwerth is Plaid Cymru’s health spokesman.