EDITORIAL: Shameful treatment by Hywel Dda board - and a shameful failure of care

The treatment of 83-year-old Charles Swift is a disgrace. He needs a nuclear medicine heart stress test at Withybush Hospital, 80 miles from his Borth home. The procedure previously left him so exhausted that he slept through until the next morning. Patients are advised not to drive afterwards; hospital staff were reportedly shocked that he had done so.

Bur Mr Swift owns a car and he was refused patient transport.

The alternatives were insulting: pay up to £200 for a community taxi — unavailable on Mondays anyway — or take the bus on a 160-mile round trip after a debilitating medical procedure. That is not patient-centred care. It is a dangerous abdication of responsibility.

Hywel Dda cannot wash its hands of this by blaming at the Welsh Ambulance Service or local councils. The board decides where services are delivered. If it centralises specialist care far from north Ceredigion, it must ensure patients can reach that care safely, affordably and with dignity. Organisational boundaries mean nothing to a patient left undiagnosed because nobody will take responsibility for the journey.

God only knows that all of the residents, from Tywyn to Tenby, have been facing the consequences of the board to reset its services over the past 12 months.

And this case lands amid damning evidence of wider failure.

This publication has revealed that the board plans to overspend by £41m, while its gross forecast is £62.2m and depends on £21.2m of unconfirmed savings. Its underlying deficit is £68.8m, and it has a black hole with a bleak outlook.

Weak leadership and poor planning produce real harm: missed appointments, delayed diagnoses, worsening anxiety and potentially avoidable medical emergencies. Mr Swift’s ordeal shows a system organised around budget, not patients.

Hywel Dda’s board must do much better — immediately. It should secure transport for Mr Swift, investigate how this failure occurred and join WAST and councils in creating a dependable rural patient-transport plan.

It should publish the number of patients missing distant appointments for transport reasons and make access a fundamental test before relocating any service. Apologies and buck-passing are no longer enough.

Nor is the absence of Health Minister Mabon ap Gwynfor.