HEALTHCARE campaigners in the Welsh Uplands have welcomed news of further engagement between local service users and the Welsh Government.

In a recent letter written by health minister Vaughan Gething to the Community Health Council, he outlines upcoming plans to speak to Ffestiniog patients to see how healthcare provision can be improved.

Suggesting that Mr Gething had previously been reluctant to deal with issues in the area, the Ffestiniog Memorial Hospital Defence Committee chairman Geraint Vaughan Jones welcomed the minister’s “more constructive” attitude.

In the letter, the minister has promised that an ‘engagement officer’, recently appointed by Betsi Cadwaladr, will arrange a public event in the area for local residents.

Mr Jones said he planned to write to Betsi Cadwaladr to remind them of how villages such as Llan Ffestiniog and Dolwyddelen had lost their local surgeries as a result of the Board’s “ill-thought-out” actions in 2013, and its “uncaring attitude” since then.

“The board needs to plan more than just a Blaenau centric event,” he said.

“When the Minister said ‘local’, one assumes that he really did mean local!”

The minister also wrote that he expected the health board “to continue to develop the [General Medical Services] model in the Blaenau Ffestiniog area”.

In response, Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board’s area director for the west, Ffion Johnstone said: “We continue to engage with people in Blaenau Ffestiniog and look forward to welcoming them to the first of a series of public drop-in sessions on 29 September 2016 to discuss current and future service provision in the area.”

Read the full story in this week’s Meirionnydd edition of the Cambrian News