First Minister defends paying outside surgeons to clear Betsi Cadwaladr waiting lists
The First Minister has told the Senedd she will not apologise for paying NHS consultants from other parts of Wales and England to clear waiting lists at Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board, after a Conservative MS warned the same short-term approach that failed in the past is recurring without sustainable solutions in place.
Mark Isherwood MS put the concern to Eluned Morgan at the final scrutiny session of the Sixth Senedd on Friday, drawing on both personal experience and a recent conversation with a senior clinician.
“A few years ago, after I’d been on a waiting list myself for three years, I was offered an appointment, which I attended in Wrexham Maelor,” Mr Isherwood told the committee.
“It was on a Saturday morning.
“The consultant was an NHS consultant from north-east England who’d been paid privately to attend and help clear the then backlog.
“After that sequence of actions, the waiting list went up again.”
He said that pattern had not changed.
“Last month, a senior NHS consultant in north Wales told me the same thing was happening again, that primarily, but not exclusively, NHS consultants from other parts of Wales and the UK were being paid to provide evening and weekend surgeries to get the waiting lists down, but sustainable solutions were not being put in place,” Mr Isherwood said.
Ms Morgan did not dispute the characterisation, but defended the approach.
“I’m not going to apologise for bringing in people to bring down the waiting list, particularly in Betsi,” she said.
“There are people who’ve been suffering on waiting lists for way too long, and if it takes us to pay people to come in and clear people, to try and sort people out, who’ve been on the waiting list for a long time — I’m not going to apologise for that.
“This is a very short-term measure.”
She pointed to a new orthopaedic hub in Llandudno as the longer-term answer, describing it as part of a network of surgical hubs intended to build more sustainable capacity across Wales.
Mr Isherwood also challenged the First Minister on primary care funding, citing long-running campaigns by the British Medical Association and the Royal College of General Practitioners under the banner “Save our Surgeries.”
He said the share of NHS spending reaching GP practices had shrunk, with GP surgeries cutting services they could previously afford to offer.
Ms Morgan disputed that primary care was being starved of resources, while acknowledging the overall pressure on the service.
“Listen, all of it needs more support — there’s no question about that — but it is simply not true, Mark, to suggest that they are getting less money than they used to.
“And I gave these figures at the beginning.
“At the beginning of the Senedd term, it was £1.5 billion.
“Now it’s £1.8 billion — that’s £300 million extra going into primary care,” she said.
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