NHS questions dominate election leaders’ programme. 8 hours ago. Mark Palmer,Assistant editor, Wales politicsand. Adrian Browne,Wales political reporter. Getty Images. The state of the NHS in Wales dominated questions from the audience in the first BBC Wales’ Your Voice Live: Ask the Leader programme ahead of the Senedd election.. Welsh Conservative Darren Millar said it was a “disgrace” that newly qualified paramedics had been told to look abroad for jobs as there were none in the Welsh NHS.. Welsh Liberal Democrat Jane Dodds said the social care “crisis” of 1,400 people being in hospital when they should not be could be addressed by a 1p income tax rise.. Plaid Cymru’s Rhun ap Iorwerth assured the audience that nobody would wait more than two years for treatment under a Plaid government. Cost of uni would have put me off, says Welsh government minister. One of the UK’s ‘prettiest’ shopping towns is feeling the pinch. The three leaders were taking questions from an audience of voters in Haverfordwest, Pembrokeshire, which is in the new west Wales constituency of Ceredigion Penfro.. All three faced questions about the health service, with the audience expressing concerns about access to GPs, hospital re-organisations and waiting lists.. On waiting lists, the latest figures show a record drop with the total number of patients waiting falling for eight months in a row.. However, they remain stubbornly high with 713,048 patient pathways – the steps from referral to treatment – on waiting lists in January, nearly 28,000 fewer than the previous month.. Millar said the NHS was in “crisis” with people “dying needlessly” – he denied that his call for a “national health emergency” was a gimmick.. He said the move would enable the Welsh government to focus resources on ensuring a “surge” in hospital bed numbers.. Millar said it was a “scandal” that newly qualified nurses and doctors could not get jobs, adding it was a “disgrace” that newly-qualified paramedics were being told “to go and work overseas to get their employment”.. He argued the problems facing the Welsh NHS were down to Labour policy-makers, at times assisted by Plaid Cymru and Liberal Democrat partners over the years.. “For every pound that’s spent per head on the NHS in England and on education in England, Wales receives one pound twenty to spend on our population here, and yet we have worse outcomes for our NHS, worse outcomes for our young people with the education system.. “That’s not right. It shows you that it’s a policy problem, and it’s a problem created by policy makers, the Labour Party, with the support of Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats.”. Millar said to fund his party’s tax cuts proposal, taking a penny off the basic rate of income tax, the party would need to cut government waste, adding: “We’ll cut the unnecessary increase in the number of politicians in Cardiff Bay.”. “We will cut the increase in bureaucracy that we’ve seen in the Welsh government over the past three yea
