Health campaign groups angry at Eluned Morgan’s likely election as First Minister

Martin Shipton

Three different groups of health campaigners have expressed anger at the prospect of Health Secretary Eluned Morgan becoming First Minister.

With Jeremy Miles’ decision not to stand in the Welsh Labour leadership election called following Vaughan Gething’s resignation, it is considered highly likely that she will be the only candidate for the post when nominations close at noon on Wednesday July 24.

If that happens, the Senedd will almost certainly be recalled to elect Baroness Morgan as First Minister. If, however, there is more than one nomination, Mr Gething will stay on as Acting First Minister until after the result of the election is known on September 14.

Infection control

A spokesperson for the group Covid Bereaved Families for Justice Cymru said: “To be clear,we just want a First Minister who doesn’t lie, delete evidence and block a Wales Covid Inquiry. One that will ensure Wales is fully prepared for the next pandemic.

“We are outraged that as Health Minister and now Cabinet Secretary Eluned Morgan has ignored the many calls for infection control in hospitals. Despite her two-year investigation into why so many died of hospital-acquired Covid in Wales, a Welsh hospital remains the most likely place that you’ll catch Covid.

“Thousands died and yet four and a half years on she’s not attempted to learn any lessons. We have zero faith that she will prioritise planning for the next pandemic.

“Welsh Labour have turned their backs on us. It’s now time for them to turn around and listen. Not just to us but to everyone else they’ve demonised in Wales.”

The spokesperson said the group would continue to press for a Wales-specific Covid Inquiry, saying: “The UK Covid Inquiry has not been able to examine what went wrong in Wales in the depth required.”

Medical negligence

Another group unhappy about the likelihood of Baroness Morgan becoming First Minister represents parents whose babies were born in the Singleton Hospital Maternity Unit in Swansea, where reports have stated that the safety of mothers and babies could not be guaranteed. There have been instances of serious medical negligence at the unit.

Parents’ group spokesperson Rob Channon, whose son Gethin suffered brain injuries while being born, said: “We met the news that Eluned Morgan intends to stand for First Minister with disbelief and disappointment.

“We received a report from top UK expert Dr Bill Kirkup in March 2022 highlighting major failings in the care of our son Gethin at his birth. Shortly after we alerted the Welsh Government to issues we thought needed to be looked at in the Swansea Bay Maternity Service.

“We have emails which show Eluned Morgan was personally informed by her Deputy Medical Director on the 14th March 2022 of the issues raised by Dr Kirkup.

“We subsequently wrote to Eluned Morgan seven times between June 2022 and December 2023.

“Each correspondence raised further alarm bells around the maternity service, as we were uncovering data and documents which showed just how unsafe the service was. Despite the seven, very clear warnings we gave the Minister nothing was done.

“When Eluned Morgan finally escalated the maternity service to ‘Enhanced Monitoring’ in December 2023 it was far too late. By this time the situation was critical:

* MBRRACE [perinatal mortality] data showed higher than average in deaths in the maternity service since 2020;

* 300 incidents under investigation;

* Four maternity related Risk Register items which had been ignored for years, one since 2011;

* Critical staff shortages at all levels, with number below even critical safety limits;

“With increasing desperation we had been raising all of these issues and many more with Eluned Morgan. We were fobbed off every time.

“The Health Inspectorate Wales Inspection Report from December 15 2023 found EIGHT immediate patient safety concerns and a litany of other issues in Singleton maternity unit.

“Since then we have tried to meet Eluned. Every request is denied with excuses like it is ‘inappropriate’ for her to meet service users. How can lessons be learned when the Minister refuses to hear them from victims?

“We were told in one letter from Eluned’s officials that her top priority is the safety of mothers and babies in the NHS. We strongly believe that Welsh Government inaction is responsible for injuries and deaths to mothers and babies in Singleton Hospital. That falls squarely on the shoulders of Eluned Morgan.”

Velindre

The Colocate Velindre campaign group has argued that a new cancer centre for south east Wales should not be built on a stand-alone site in Cardiff, but adjacent to a district general hospital so other medical facilities are close at hand.

A spokesperson for the group said: “We are preparing to file an official complaint against the Health Secretary for infringement of the ministerial code. We are claiming ministerial misrepresentation in statements on cancer policy through officials that ‘reflect the Welsh Government’s position’, so a strategy from the highest level.

“We merely sought a public retraction of inaccurate statements seriously skewing public perception of the new Velindre. But instead the correspondence left a paper trail of one problematic narrative being replaced by another

“The Welsh Government had run into widespread clinical criticism from senior clinicians and eminent experts for locating its new cancer centre away from any major hospital. It claimed in 2021 that the Nuffield Trust’s advice in 2020 was an independent, clinical review of the cancer centre model’s appropriateness (a ‘standalone’), only to quickly withdraw the claim when confronted with Nuffield’s dissent from this. But in September 2023 an email to the Health Secretary encountered recirculation of this already discredited claim.

“We exposed the contradiction and elicited a second apology. An official’s mistake was apparently to blame – even though more than one ministerial department had similarly offended. It now only meant the clinical model ‘was subject to Nuffield.’ But this new version, we complained,, was also untrue as the ‘standalone’ model had already become fixed policy and so was not ‘subject to Nuffield’. The terms of reference allowed only for managing the risks, not for a turnaround to a colocated model.

“The government’s position – the Health Secretary’s – now morphed completely. The ‘clinical model’ actually meant the model for the whole cancer network, not that underpinning the cancer centre. Unfortunately this assertion contradicted the government’s claim which sparked the correspondence in the first place.

“A complaint of one false statement about Nuffield seems to have led to further misrepresentations by the health department, since not all the statements can be true.”

‘Bob’s your uncle’

If Baroness Morgan is elected First Minister, she will be the first member of the House of Lords to head a government in the UK since the Conservative Robert Cecil, the third Marquis of Salisbury, in 1903.

Robert passed the post to his nephew Arthur Balfour, which gave rise to the phrase “If you want a job, Bob’s your uncle!”

Baroness Morgan will also be the first ever peer from the Labour Party to head a government.