Plaid Cymru's 5-step plan to tackle health care pressures
The party says that implementation of the plan will benefit staff, patients, and those that administer the service
Plaid Cymru has today launched it's plan to help tackle the crisis in the NHS in Wales.
The plan offers both immediate and longer-term solutions for the problems facing the health service and the party says that implementation of the plan will benefit staff, patients and those that administer the service.
Adam Price MS, Leader of Plaid Cymru has said the plan offers "practical solutions" to "very real problems"
The plan will be debated in the Senedd tomorrow (25th January) as part of a call on the Welsh Government to bring forward a strategy to reduce the pressures facing the NHS.
Plaid Cymru's 5-step NHS plan:
Pay - Providing a fair deal for NHS workers to create the foundation for a sustainable NHS
- Awarding NHS workers in Wales with an improved, substantive pay offer to being counteracting more than a decade of decline in wages.
Workforce retention - Making the NHS an attractive place to work
- Creating a clear delivery strategy with targets and full costing for a 'Workforce Plan'
- Reforming data collection so that staffing needs can be identified earlier
- Expanding training places and apprenticeship available
- Creating a public staffing agency to facilitate flexible working across the healthcare profession whilst removing private profit-making from agency working.
Prevention - Significantly elevating the prominence and priority given to preventative health measures
- Clear ministerial accountability for ensuring that preventative health measures, delivered across all government departments
-  Include government-wide targets - underpinned by clearly-defined metrics and milestones agreed with healthcare professionals - on health prevention within a ‘Healthy Wales’ delivery programme.
Health and Social Care interaction - Taking a sustainable approach to ensure a seamless service - one that is efficiently tailored at point of need
- Improving resilience at the point of interaction between health and care by increasing the capacity of step-down facilities for those patients still in hospital who no longer require acute care.
- Closer co-ordination with local authorities to ensure timely care assessments are taking place.Â
Delivery and recovery - Creating a resilient health service fit for the future
- Providing the new NHS Executive for Wales with the power to make real change, as a clinically led, patient centred executive that works in partnership with the third sector, professional bodies and the patient voice to drive change and reduce variation, as well as working closely with the WLGA to improve local delivery.
- Holding delivery bodies to account in an open and transparent way, ensuring that new models of care are rolled out consistently.
- Identify ways of stripping out duplication of bureaucracy and administration between health boards. Â
- Encourage the co-design of elective surgery hubs with healthcare professionals. Â
Leader of the Plaid Cymru Adam Price MS said: " here is a health crisis in Wales for which new thinking is required – a health crisis which Welsh Government cannot admit exists in the first place.
"But when ambulance response times and emergency department waiting times are at an all-time high, and workers are taking to the picket line over unfair pay and unsafe working conditions, then the question has to be asked: If this isn’t a crisis, then how much worse are they expecting it to get?"
“I’ve said before that no one party has a monopoly on good ideas, but when the Tories offer privatisation, and Labour offer nothing, then Plaid Cymru is the one group in the Senedd offering practical solutions to the very real problems we’re facing in Wales."