Welsh Tories to declare health emergency and send volunteers to hospitals if elected

Volunteers? AI? I prefer paid staff. And I do not care what country they are from, unlike the Tory party. You need throughput, elderly nation needs a care package and staff to look after or people bed block. It's not a one hit fixes all.

Presumably funded by increasing income tax.

It would be interesting to know where he thinks he can find these "trained and vetted volunteers"! Also I really don't think NHS Cymru is much worse than NHS England. My social media input is primarily Cymru based, but I have seen two NHS Trusts in England (Worcester and Nottingham) declare critical incidents or similar in the last week. Even pre-Covid there were lots of problems in England with ambulance delays and waits for admission. My husband was taken to Hereford County Hospital in December 2019 and was cared for in a corridor. We were told that we were lucky to be going to Hereford as the waiting time was shorter than in other hospitals in the area served by West Midlands Ambulance Service. It's obviously not right in either country, but ultimately it's down to decisions taken by governments of both countries and both parties over the last 30+ years. I can remember being told, by a consultant as a social worker, in 1992 that if I did not feel it was appropriate for someone to be discharged then they could stay until they were ready! Shortly after that the Community Care Act was implemented and suddenly it became "Get them out as fast as possible" leading to the revolving door situation where people came back because problems had not been resolved. I was glad to leave the Health and Social Care Sector when i retired in 2008.

More soundbites from a man whose Westminster party is largely responsible for Wales’s historical ill health. He campaigned for Brexit — a decision that robbed Wales of highly skilled medical professionals from Europe — and, when in office, his party not only denied our Senedd vital HS2 consequentials but also continued to underfund Wales through the archaic Barnett formula, while constantly interfering in devolved matters. These actions have created and perpetuated the ongoing social and health crisis we face today. If Darren Millar truly wants to help our NHS and Wales, he should step down and go away. “Empty vessels make the most noise” — a wise proverb that typifies both the Welsh Conservatives and Reform UK to a tee. #Ymlaen 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 #VotePlaidCymru 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 #May7th #PuttingWalesFirstNotLast 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 #DarrenMillar 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 #WelshConservatives 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧#DoubtingThomas 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 ReformUK 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿🇬🇧 #WelshNot ⛔🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

Because that's what understaffed hospitals need during an outbreak. An influx of unqualified people trying to tell them how to do their jobs more efficiently whilst simultaneously getting in the way. Has he really thought this through?

Don’t have much time for this modern fashion of ‘declaring’ something to be a national emergency as if that in itself constitutes any kind of action. On the contrary it would be nice to see politicians move out of the business of creating unnecessary hysteria. None of the actual policies outlined depend on such a declaration. Just pure theatre.

So the Tories will end business rates, cut income tax and abolish land transaction tax at a cost of nearly a billion pounds all at the same time as increasing spending on health and building a new M4 relief road (2-3 billion) and ending the 20mph (60 million). At the same time council tax will be frozen. This will mean huge and unprecedented cuts and austerity elsewhere.

It all seems somewhat hypocritical from a bunch of politicians who have spent the best part of half a century thrusting neoliberal economics on us. It is those economics that are responsible for most of the malaise in our society, and yet no-one really challenges the narrative that there is no alternative to the neoliberal economics that we know don't work, never have worked and never will work. The only success of neoliberalism, and in fact the only thing it was designed to do was to enrich the already obscenely rich and bring us to a point where we stand on the edge of an abyss: environmental destruction and fascism, and it is the Tories as much as any other political party who are responsible for the predicament of both our society and our NHS. The Welsh NHS is slowly getting better, and I was recently surprised to experience that change for the better. I was referred as an outpatient to a consultant for a full diagnosis and had expected to wait at least 21 weeks after being referred - I waited less than four weeks, and I received a text message asking me to ring the department back to arrange an appointment. I was doubly surprised that a) the appointment was four days later, and b) the appointment was on a Sunday. Clearly there is still a long way to go in getting our NHS back to where it was years ago, and it will need a lot more funding to create the slack needed to allow proper thought out reforms, hopefully without the depredations of maverick politicians who only think they know what they are doing. Ordinary people are already being taxed far too much, and cannot bear any more of the burden. It is now high time to do what the mainstream political parties consider to be the unthinkable and that is to tax the obscenely rich and the global corporations heavily and properly. Tax at source and it won't matter where the bastards move to offshore, they will still pay their dues. Remember they only make their money by leeching on the rest of us.

Has anyone asked retired medics if they want to work for free?