STROKE victims are suffering serious long-term disabilities because a succession of Welsh health ministers has failed to act effectively over dramatically worsening ambulance response times caused by bed-blocking and overstretched accident-and-emergency units.

A record as dismal as this should be enough to ensure Labour’s defeat at next year’s Senedd elections.

Currently, people suffering strokes and therefore in dire need of swift medical intervention are waiting for two hours or more for help to arrive - often because frustrated ambulance crews are left immobilised outside accident-and-emergency units, unable to hand over on-board patients because jam-packed hospitals have no empty beds.

Bed-blocking figures from earlier this year show that as many as 20 per cent of patients are being kept unnecessarily in hospital because there is nowhere else safe for them to go.

Ambulances are also regularly brought to a standstill when A-and-E units are put under needless pressure by people with minor problems they could deal with themselves or with advice from a pharmacist.

Meanwhile, in stark illustration of the inadequacy of co-ordination between the Welsh NHS, local authorities and the private sector, places potentially well-suited as care settings between hospital and home are, ludicrously, discarded. In Ceredigion alone, examples include Tregerddan care home in Bow Street, Penparcau’s Bodlondeb and the former Abermad nursing-home near Llanilar.

As patients suffer, and perhaps die, largely because of this disorganisation, and thwarted ambulance crews gnash their teeth as they wait stranded outside A-and-E units, a succession of trundling Labour administrations has signally failed to provide effective overall strategic directioning that would spin the hospital-ambulance-care sectors into an efficiently functioning whole.

Remedies suggest themselves. Cardiff should intervene to stop care-homes - public and private - shutting, immediately lessening, or even solving, hospital bed-blocking.

A public education campaign should be launched to discourage people from cluttering up accident-and-emergency departments with footling complaints which could be handled over the phone or without hospital treatment.

Jason Killens, until recently chief executive of Welsh Ambulance Services NHS Trust, and now in the parallel role with the London ambulance service, has warned that “avoidable harm” is being caused to Welsh patients, particularly in the second most serious - amber, including strokes - category, by “unacceptable” ambulance delays which are largely beyond the service’s control.

He says: “When I came here in 2018 we were losing around 6,000 hours a month. At peak, last year, we were losing nearly 30,000 hours a month. Hundreds of patients every month come to some degree of avoidable harm because we can't get to them quick enough.”

Response times to amber calls - which include chest pains and strokes - have worsened as hundreds of ambulances throughout Wales each month get stuck for hours outside hospitals while waiting to hand over patients.

But why have successive health ministers failed to grasp that the onset of a stroke demands a priority ranking for ambulance response?

Finally, that fact has clicked with Wales’s latest health minister, Jeremy Miles. Starting this winter, a new “orange” category for ambulance 999 calls will be introduced, with the aim of speeding up and improving care for people reporting strokes.

Currently, these are in a broad “amber” category covering about 70 per cent of all ambulance emergency calls. Which is not where they should be. Under the new initiative, specialist nurses and paramedics will screen calls to identify patients who need a rapid response, and specialist care from paramedics, before being taken to hospital.

According to Miles, this will allow stroke patients to receive “the rapid, tailored response they need to survive, recover and thrive”.

Why, though, has it taken so long for this potentially very important step forward to be adopted?

Why apparently did no government department or minister notice the catastrophic slide in ambulance amber response times in, for example, the nine years to 2024?

Why did no-one at Welsh government level act effectively to halt what has been a disastrous decline - from average response times of just over 11 minutes in 2015 to nearly two hours in 2024?

Why, specifically, was Eluned Morgan, health minister for three years from 2021, seemingly blind to this catastrophic worsening? Didn’t she notice what was going on, or did she simply fail to do anything effective to stop the rot?

What about her predecessors during the period in question - Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gething? The evidence of government-level supervised neglect of stroke victims seems irresistible in their cases too.

And yet with every notch that average amber response times grew, so inevitably did the prospect for patients of long-term damage to speech, movement, brain function.

Last month, Jack Goodchild, who lives in Rhydyfelin, near Aberystwyth, told the Cambrian News his father had a stroke and waited two-and-a-half hours for an ambulance. In the end, he in desperation drove him to Bronglais Hospital in the back of a van. Without his intervention, the hospital told him, his father “would almost certainly have lost the ability to walk or talk.”

Welsh Labour government failures over so many years to tackle a highly visible and dramatically worsening crisis over bed-blocking, overstretched A-and-E departments and consequent marked deterioration in ambulance response times is so serious a shortcoming that it will be surprising if voters don’t register the fact at next year’s polling.

POLITICIANS don’t usually need much persuading to tell us what they think, even if their utterances are revealed to now and again veer towards stinginess with the truth.

When it’s not so, their favourite trick is to go silent. This is what’s happening over the continuing scandal of Members of the Senedd shamelessly slotting each others’ relatives and friends into well paid, publicly-funded jobs that members of the public never get the chance to apply for. It would be mincing words to describe this wheeze as anything other than corrupt.

That, and, into the bargain, a recommendation that information about this malodorous arrangement should be hidden from the public, despite a clear conflict of interest.

MSs who came under a small-scale flurry of media attention about all this a month or so ago will have assumed that, having been given a bit of an airing, the subject had been laid to rest, blotted out by the daily whirlpool of social media claptrap.

Luckily for anyone who has yet to abandon a fixed expectation of open and accountable democratic government, it hasn’t been. For one thing, the entirety of this slice of sleaze from the Senedd’s fantasy-named standards committee is, for the moment, no more than a recommendation, albeit one which the committee, and no doubt MSs at large, assume will win the full Senedd’s approval when it comes up for debate later this month. Without howls of public disapproval, that may indeed be exactly what happens.

Just a reminder of what we’re talking about. The jobs-for-the-favoured tasks in question are not about tea-making, dusting framed photographs of MSs’ nearest and dearest or taking the member’s dog for a walk. They are for such as caseworkers, researchers, administrators, offering paid holidays and pensions and salaries of up to perhaps £50,000.

Only one of the MSs I emailed on this - including upcoming candidate Baroness Morgan - got back to me. But the exception, Ceredigion MS Elin Jones, repeatedly declined to say whether she does or doesn’t approve of publicly-funded jobs for each others’ families and friends. That was a disappointment. Equally, she’ll know that silence almost invariably means assent.