Part of the debate – Senedd Cymru am 4:07 pm ar 28 Mawrth 2023.
Thanks very much, and you're quite right, and I'm going to just pay tribute to the receptionists who very often have a really tough time from the public. And, actually, I do hope that the public will be respectful to receptionists who have a very difficult job, especially when you consider that, in December, there were 400,000 contacts in one week, I think it was, to GP practices. So, this is a huge, huge amount of contacts being made to GPs.
But just in relation to pharmacists, well, we're well ahead of what's happening elsewhere in the rest of the UK when it comes to pharmacies, and, of course, we've got that community pharmacy contract. And what's great is that now, we have 704 pharmacies providing treatment for common ailments, emergency contraception and other issues. The key thing for us to understand is that we're now taking that even further. So, we're trying to get them to prescribe on top. Because these people are highly, highly skilled, and it's now about using their skills to take some of that pressure off GPs. So, by the end of this year, we're expecting one in three pharmacies in Wales to be able to deliver that prescribing service, so I think that's pretty good news. The 111 service has been exceptionally successful and hopefully, now, people will understand that the 111 'press 2' service for mental health is also available.
Just in terms of community nursing—and thank you, again, for championing this, because I know you're a real champion when it comes to this—you're quite right, what we need is multidisciplinary teams, and the No. 1 priority I have given to health boards this year is to say, 'You've got to move more resources from secondary, effectively, into primary care, into our communities'. We have to be working together, with local authorities, building those multidisciplinary teams around the patient and making sure that they're working with allied health professionals. So, I think we're going to see quite an acceleration in that space in the next few months.