Welsh staff ‘may have treated Covid with poor PPE’

In her evidence the first minister defended the decision not to hold a national investigation into hospital-acquired infections.

Giving evidence on Wednesday afternoon, Morgan said more than 18,630 individual cases were investigated by health boards and they “could not have been more thorough”.

She said it was difficult to single out a cause as there were “lots of causes”.

Morgan was asked if the suggestion that health boards could be facing civil claims from patients and families of up to £69m was a factor.

She said it was “not a focus of mine” and said their focus was more on learning lessons.

Morgan conceded that restarting routine surgery could have been planned earlier.

But she was unsure it could have been implemented, given the pressures the systems were under.

She also told the inquiry that, on an unplanned visit to an orthopaedic hub, she found that there were 13 surgeons not working.

“They weren’t there,” she said. “So, the monitoring, the management was not happening in the way that it should have been happening.”

She said people needed to be held to account and she did not receive a satisfactory explanation. She took steps afterwards to make it clear that “things had to change”.

Morgan added that private healthcare did not give much capacity to deal with the backlog, with only 172 private beds available.

Some were used – as were private beds across the border in England.

The situation in NHS England was different, where they were able to clear 18% of their backlog by using the private sector.