Local County Councillors have today expressed their dismay and deep concerns over the process followed to date by Hywel Dda University Health Board in relation to the proposed closure of Meddygfa’r Sarn GP surgery in Pontyates, and have condemned the Health Board’s actions and attitude towards engagement with local patients and communities.
The concerns raised by Councillors Tyssul Evans, Meinir James and Alex Evans follow an engagement session held with councillors on Monday evening, during which a number of deeply troubling issues became clear:
• The scope of the eight-week engagement exercise will not consider alternatives to closure and will focus only on the impact that closing the surgery will have on communities.
• Hywel Dda has not attempted to recruit a salaried (permanent) GP for Meddygfa’r Sarn for over a year, and would not commit to making a further attempt to recruit a permanent doctor prior to the Board’s next meeting in May, at which closure of the surgery will be considered.
• A senior officer of the Health Board stated that Hywel Dda policies did not require community engagement at all, and that a decision to close the surgery could have been agreed at the Board meeting in January without any engagement process.
The councillors also raised serious concerns regarding the limited number of in-person drop-in sessions, the exclusion of multiple affected villages, the absence of any evening sessions, and the fact that residents may receive notification of the engagement only around a week before the first scheduled session. These issues have been raised directly with Hywel Dda, highlighting the importance of ensuring that in-person engagement is accessible to all affected communities.
Speaking jointly, the councillors said:
“Following the answers given and the attitudes displayed by Hywel Dda representatives during the online engagement session held on Monday evening for local councillors, we have lost all confidence in this engagement exercise.
Learning that alternatives to closure will not be considered as part of the engagement was, in our view, the final straw. Given that the Health Board has already had to publicly apologise to our communities for how this proposal was first announced, we expected a far greater level of care to be taken to ensure that this process was fair, open and credible.
We continue to urge all patients and residents to make their voices heard over the next eight weeks, but we are now clear that a separate, full public consultation, with independent oversight, will be required if the future of Meddygfa’r Sarn is to be decided fairly and transparently.”
