COLUMN: The erosion of Welshpool health services has to stop
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“People living in North Powys are used to travelling further for many of the services that others take for granted. That is part of living in a large rural county. What we should not have to accept is the steady erosion of those services altogether.
That is why I am deeply concerned by the latest proposals from Powys Teaching Health Board.
The Health Board says that all community hospital sites will retain services. That sounds reassuring, but its own papers tell a rather more complicated story. The options being recommended for public consultation would concentrate community inpatient beds on either three sites — Newtown, Llandrindod Wells and Brecon — or just two, Newtown and Brecon.
At present, community inpatient beds are provided at eight sites across Powys. Under either proposal, therefore, inpatient provision would disappear from the majority of our community hospitals.
For North Powys, this is particularly concerning. Welshpool, Machynlleth and Llanidloes would all lose their community inpatient beds under both options.
We cannot consider this in isolation.
Closer to home, there is the proposed closure of the Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant Branch Surgery. We already have concerns about ambulance provision, access to GPs and our dependence upon hospitals across the border in England. The Health Board’s own assessment acknowledges that concentrating inpatient services would increase journey times and create an additional travel burden for communities including Llanfyllin.
Nor is the feeling that North Powys is being overlooked confined to healthcare. We are also having to fight over the future of the Llanfyllin highways depot and what changes could mean for gritting routes and winter resilience.
Taken individually, we are always given an explanation for each decision. Taken together, a rather different picture emerges.
Powys residents are poorly served as it is. Increasingly, those of us in North Powys are being made to feel like second-class citizens within our own county.
I have no objection to providing more healthcare in people's homes. Indeed, where it is clinically appropriate and properly resourced, that can be better for patients. But the crucial words are properly resourced.
You cannot take beds away first and hope that the staff and community services needed to replace them materialise afterwards. PTHB’s own papers acknowledge the need to develop the enhanced community workforce, and that detailed workforce planning will depend upon the option eventually chosen.
There is also a wider question of responsibility.
Powys Teaching Health Board has difficult decisions to make, but ultimately the Welsh Government funds our NHS. Delivering healthcare across a vast, sparsely populated rural county costs money. A funding system which fails properly to recognise geography, travelling distances and dispersed communities will inevitably put local services under pressure.
The Health Minister is also, like me, a Member of the Senedd for Gwynedd Maldwyn. He knows these communities and the difficulties people face.
I will therefore continue working with my Reform UK colleagues representing Powys to press him and the Welsh Government for action. I will also be challenging PTHB directly over these proposals, particularly the effect on North Powys and whether the promised community provision will genuinely be in place before existing services are removed.
People in Llanfyllin, Llanrhaeadr, Welshpool and the surrounding communities are not asking for special treatment.
We are asking for a fair level of public service and recognition that rural communities matter too.
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