Hospital pressure to continue for a month, health minister says

Pressures on Welsh hospitals are expected to continue until at least mid-October, Wales' health minister has said.

Eluned Morgan has asked people to only use A&E services and GP surgeries if absolutely necessary.

Some health boards have already postponed routine surgery and suspended some visits.

It comes as Public Health Wales reports eight further deaths with Covid, and 2,317 new cases.

It brings the total in Wales throughout the pandemic to 5,734 deaths and 306,060 cases.

First Minister Mark Drakeford said on Friday that modelling suggested there could be "100 new Covid-19 hospital admissions" every day in Wales by the end of September as that is when experts expect the Delta-variant infection to peak.

The Covid infection rate in Wales has risen to 557 cases for every 100,000 people - the highest since December last year.

Ms Morgan said case numbers "are likely to continue... until at least the end of September and then we're likely to see a levelling off".

Because of the lag between people catching Covid and potentially ending up in hospital, Ms Morgan said this suggests the pressure on hospitals will "continue at least until about mid-October".

Ms Morgan added a "really difficult" decision must be made on whether to introduce vaccination passports, as England scraps their plans to do so.

A decision is expected by next Friday on whether the passports will be made mandatory in order to gain entry to some events in Wales. They are being introduced in Scotland from 1 October.

"There are lots of practical and ethical issues we've got to consider around vaccine passports," Ms Morgan told BBC Politics Wales.

"Clearly, there's a hope that suggestions that we may need vaccine passports for nightclubs, for example, may help drive the numbers of young people who may want to take the vaccine up."

More than a fifth of young people aged 16-39 in Wales have yet to receive one dose of the vaccine.

"We know the [case] rates are incredibly high at the moment amongst young people and so that's why we're very anxious to drive those numbers up," Ms Morgan said.

The Betsi Cadwaladr health board in north Wales announced on Friday it was suspending routine operations and halted most hospital visits.

Cwm Taf Morgannwg health board has also suspended most patient visits for "the safety of our patients and staff" at its facilities in Merthyr Tydfil, Bridgend and Rhondda Cynon Taf.

At its height back in January, there were 1,643 confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Welsh hospitals, compared to 441 cases earlier this week.

But the total number of people in Welsh hospitals because of Covid or other reasons is at its highest level since the start of the pandemic.

The health minister said there were "difficulties getting people out of hospital" because of a lack of social care staff.

She said she was having weekly meetings with councils and the health boards to deal with a "quite critical" situation.

She blamed Brexit, "because we did have a lot of eastern European workers", and people moving to work in the tourism sector over the summer.

Fewer than half of social care workers earn a "real living wage", according to research published by Cardiff University in August 2020.

Paying social care staff the real living wage of £9.50 an hour was a key Welsh Labour manifesto commitment, so Ms Morgan said the government was "in the process of working with the trade unions to make sure that when we give that living wage that the money actually gets to the people on the frontline".

In terms of changing the social care system, she said ministers have "a long-term ambition" to introduce free personal care "but it is going to take us a while to get to that point".

An independent report published in 2018 suggested an income tax rise in Wales of between 1% and 3% could be used to fund elderly social care.

Asked if a social care levy was off the table in light of the UK government's National Insurance hike, Ms Morgan said: "I think it would be very difficult for us to be taxing people twice for the same service."