Madam,

Your shocking page one story highlights the plight of Mary Clarke, the Labour Party’s current Prospective Parliamentary Candidate for Arfon.

You mention, rightly, that she was the Parliamentary candidate for Dwyfor Meirionnydd in 2015.

I was Labour’s Senedd candidate in 2016 and, at hustings and in the press at the time, heard a huge volume of criticism of the health service in north Wales.

There seems to me to be little doubt that the north is suffering from the short-sightedness of Cardiff-based health decisions.

Here, we have a small town and village structure in Dwyfor Meirionnydd with big distances between them.

That suggests a cottage hospital system for each town with as much high tech equipment as can be afforded. Yet we hear of yet another centralisation of services (‘Moving vascular services could be life threatening’).

I personally found the closure of Blaenau Ffestiniog’s Memorial Hospital a tragic blow struck by an insensitive bureaucracy to the health and social well-being of a community. There are still not the bed facilities required, I understand, at its replacement. I could not defend the action as a candidate.

Mary Clarke’s plight is of course in part due directly to the Tory austerity policy and the cuts to monies to Wales. GPs presumably cannot register temporary residents (what about the homeless, then?) because of under-staffing.

Sadly, I too have experienced extraordinary rigidities in the health practices here, but also the greatest possible care and concern by health professionals. I do believe that the rigidities arise when staff and facilities are overstretched and poorly provided with resources.

Where, for example, are the Welsh government help desks and telephone lines in Gwynedd? Where is the constant flow of ministers, their aids, civil servants and Senedd sub-committees on fact-finding visits?

Yours etc,

Ian MacIntyre, Shelbourne Court, Barmouth.

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