Welsh NHS not 'fundamantally broken', says health minister

The NHS in Wales is not "fundamentally broken" and will live within its means despite the pressure on budgets and services, the country's health minister has said.

Mabon ap Gwynfor said he would look at using money and resources differently - including shifting resources from hospitals to GP practices - in order to drive down waiting lists.

Currently the Welsh government spends more than half its budget on health and an extra £120m is to go on reducing the waits further.

The new government has said the number of patients waiting more than two years for treatment will be eradicated in Wales within a matter of months.

A network of up to 10 surgical hubs is being created to try to reduce the backlog in treatment. The exact details are still being worked on.

He told BBC Politics Wales: "We will be working within the budget that we've got.

"It will take time but it will mean that people will have improved their outcomes and we won't see those individuals going on those long pathways and waiting for treatment in future.

"I'm convinced that we can make things work and improve outcomes for the people of Wales and that's the important thing."

A graduate summit will be held this month to try to prevent a freeze in recruitment, which has resulted in newly trained paramedics and nursing staff being forced to look for work elsewhere, from happening again in future.

The first part of an NHS workforce plan will be published in the autumn.

He said NHS staff were working in very difficult circumstances but said the service was not "fundamentally broken".

But he gave a bleak assessment of the state of services when he addressed the Senedd in the week.

The longest waits of more than two years have been going down for the past 10 months in succession.

First Minister Rhun ap Iorweth came under pressure from Reform's Welsh leader Dan Thomas over his waiting times target earlier this week when he took questions in the Senedd for the first time since Plaid Cymru won the election.

Ap Gwynfor believes those waiting lists could start to go back up again unless the entire system changed.

He said: "The Labour government invested £1.5bn on bringing down the waiting lists, but they didn't build capacity.

"They concentrated on short-term sticking plaster fixes.

"Now that's going to result in those numbers going back up again, unless we put a system in place that tackles that at an early stage.

"So it's not always all about the money.

"So if you look at theatre spaces in Wales at the moment, they're not utilised to their maximum capacity, they're not utilised to their full abilities."

Former Labour first minister Eluned Morgan said waiting lists falling nine months in a row before the Senedd election was the "biggest sustained drop on record", calling it "real progress".