There is a truly bizarre item in today’s Western Mail in which Plaid Cymru’s Chief Whip highlights the failure of his own government to get to grips with the ambulance service.
He then suggests that rather than sort out the Trust’s financial problems and the structural problems elsewhere that are the cause of many of the failures to hit targets, the Minister should dismantle it and hand responsibility for emergency transport to individual trusts instead.
Chris Franks has discovered that nearly 100 patients were taken to hospital in police vehicles over the past year because ambulances were not available. He suggests that the government has provided substantial resources to the Welsh Ambulance Service, but that they are still not performing. His solution is to transfer management of the service to the new health boards.
As usual, Plaid Cymru have twisted the facts to their own purposes. Far from providing substantial resources, their government has imposed impossible efficiency targets on the Wales Ambulance Services Trust (WAST) – £40m over two years in total. Whilst the Minister is writing off debts for health boards, she is insisting that WAST repays its deficit and contributes to the repayment of the money owed by Health Commission Wales.
At the same time important capital bids are taking too long to be processed, whilst a shortage of acute beds in many parts of Wales and delays at accident and emergency departments are adding to the problem faced in hitting the ambulance service’s target. Despite all of this WAST actually achieved its best ever figures last month, a performance that cannot be sustained unless these other problems are addressed.
If Chris Franks were in charge of the Titanic he would be insisting that the iceberg was a fiction of our imagination, whilst launching a major overhaul of deckchair deployment. The fact is that Plaid Cymru are part of the government that are failing patients by not getting the investment in the ambulance service right.
This latest Plaid policy of reorganising their way out of a crisis is complete nonsense, whilst the tactic of publicly campaigning for change within their own coalition is nothing more than displacement activity designed to hide their own failings.
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