There is no doubting the hard work, professionalism and commitment of our NHS workforce in Wales.
Many more people receive brilliant care than those who have a poor experience. But it is clear that key performance targets continue to be missed and that, as a result, not everyone is getting the experience they deserve. It is perhaps for this reason that a recent UK wide poll by YouGov found that patient satisfaction in Wales was lower at just 72% than in England and Scotland at 80% and 84%.
There are a whole host of targets which the Welsh Government sets for our NHS but, regrettably, many of these are being routinely missed and show little sign of being achieved in the near future.
Record-breaking numbers of people are waiting more than 36 weeks for treatment, there are record-breaking lows in ambulance service performance against life-threatening calls and record-breaking numbers of patients spending 12 hours or more in Welsh emergency departments.
Latest figures show that fewer than half of ambulances arrived at the scene of an immediately life-threatening call within eight minutes in January.
The figure for category A calls was 48.5% making January the second worst month on record for the ambulance service. With fewer calls, this figure is 6% higher than the record low for December 2014.
Wales has the lowest target in the UK, at 65%, but it has only been met once in the past two and half years.
When someone suffers a stroke, heart attack or serious accident, delays in attendance by an ambulance can make the difference between life and death and threaten prospects of recovery.
But poor performance by the Ambulance service is just one symptom of an unscheduled care system that is under pressure. Emergency departments across Wales are also under performing.
The four hour target from arrival to admission, transfer or discharge has not been met since 2009 and more than 3,000 patients spent more than 12 hours or more in a Welsh emergency department, a record high, in January.
Emergency departments are choked up due to one fifth of beds being axed from Welsh hospitals in the past decade and the closure of alternatives to A&E, such as minor injuries units, by health boards across Wales.
The situation is so bad that one consultant in Wrexham, where there’s just a one in three chance of being in A&E for four hours or less, said ‘we are under siege – the whole world is at our door – and we just can’t cope.’
His words were echoed by a senior nurse at the University Hospital of Wales who said that the stress faced by A&E staff there is worse than she faced on the front line during the second Iraq war.
And the performance problems in the health service are not just confined to unscheduled care - patients are also waiting too long for diagnostic tests.
The Welsh Government’s target is that patients should receive their diagnostic test within 8 weeks, yet more than one in four patients waited longer than this in the most recently published figures compared to one in a thousand for some tests over the border in England.
Then there’s planned treatment. The Wales Audit Office, the Nuffield Trust and even the House of Commons Library have all confirmed that Welsh patients suffer from longer waits for elective treatment than patients in England and Scotland too.
One in seven are now on a waiting list in Wales and record number of patients, some 21,000 of them, waiting for more than 9 months. The Wales Audit Office has warned of evidence that patients are coming to harm as a result of long waiting times.
These performance issues must be addressed. Wales needs a detailed plan of action to deliver sustained improvement against targets and a timetable by which they will be met and record breaking cuts to our health service must be reversed to enable our fantastic NHS staff to deliver the standards patients expect - it is time for change.