HYWEL Dda University Health Board has announced it plans to launch a formal consultation, aimed at making provision of local health and care better for our communities, on Thursday April 19, subject to formal Board approval on that day.
The health board will present options for future provision of health and care services to the general population, which it thinks are safe, viable and offer an improvement to what is currently provided. The 12 week exercise will involve a number of events for communities, both general and targeted, as well as an awareness raising campaign, and will be called ‘Hywel Dda – Our big NHS change’.
Medical Director Phil Kloer said: “I would like to thank our staff, communities and partners for their involvement so far in our transformation programme (Transforming Clinical Services). Hundreds of people were involved in our listening and engagement exercise last summer, and since then we have held many staff drop-in events, involving partners and staff in scoring six potential options.
“We want to thank everyone for their insight and expertise offered thus far. We are using what we have heard to further reduce the number of options we present in consultation and provide a greater level of detail on them. I must stress that no decisions have been made by the Board, and we want to hear what people think of our options, and consider any new ideas.”
The health board will now be considering the impact, consequences and resources of options and preparing itself for being able to capture everybody’s views before it announces the detail of options in its consultation.
The programme, which is clinically led, will seek permission from full Health Board to proceed to consultation on 19th April. The 12 week consultation programme will then follow and all views will be listened to and independently analysed. An analysis report will then be submitted to full board, hopefully in September, so they can make a decision on how to proceed.
Dr Kloer said: “Please watch this space and get involved. People can be kept updated by visiting our website and for staff, our staff Intranet, and we also encourage people to follow our social media pages on Facebook and Twitter as we approach consultation in a few weeks.”
