Madam,

I read with horror and disbelief that Hywel Dda University Health Board wishes to restructure once again the way it delivers its services here in mid and west Wales!

As the former chairman of Hywel Dda Community Health Council (the statutory patients watchdog) and the former vice-chair of the national body of CHCs, I’m at best livid and at worst unable, in polite company, to write down what I really think of this backtracking by the health board, albeit I would suggest under terrific pressure from this moribund and lack-lustre Welsh Government in Cardiff.

We fought long and hard and protested outside the Senedd, just those few short years ago to make the health board and Welsh Government see that here in mid and west Wales we have more than a special case to have a fully functioning district general hospital here at Bronglais with a state-of-the-art A&E department, so why are they resurrecting a big chunk of the discredited ‘change programme’ that the last set of senior directors and board members wanted to implement?

The people of mid and west Wales may also wish to ask, have the promises as outlined and accepted from the Longley Review been shelved? If so, has all the money and time in setting up the Mid Wales Collaborative been wasted, especially if it was their intention all along to seek to downgrade services and/or close hospitals?

What I find very difficult to accept is that both the First Minister, Carwyn Jones and the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, Vaughan Gethin are alumni of Aberystwyth University and know only too well the strategic importance of Bronglais to the ‘safe’ delivery of health-care here in mid and west Wales, or has living and working in the Cardiff bubble obfuscated their view?

So Hywel Dda University Health Board, here’s the ultimatum, Bronglais must continue to have the service configuration it has to date. Indeed, it needs further development and investment as the demands on its A&E and other disciplines from an ever-ageing population with multiple morbidities is there for all to see. Anyone with a modicum of common-sense can see that service delivery needs enhancing not reducing and to be locally delivered, more to the point!

I do hope we are not now looking once again at the insane idea of flying fleets of helicopters transferring patients down to hospital services on the M4 corridor as hinted at by the previous regime.

This is ‘our health service’ not a trifle to be played with by government. We as the taxpayer will tell you what we want not the other way around. My concluding remark is this, some of the suggestions I’ve heard to date should never ever be contemplated by a competent public services body. So get your flip charts and post-it notes out again, the demand is for quality services delivered locally not an appeased ‘back of a fag packet plan’ to satisfy an out of touch government!

Yours etc,

Paul Hinge, county councillor for Tirymynach Ward, Ceredigion County Council, Bow Street.

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