Powys can't trust a Health Board that won't listen, politician says
Powys can't trust a Health Board that won't listen, politician says
On the morning of Wednesday, September 16, Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe MP David Chadwick and I went to Powys Teaching Health Board carrying 7,930 signatures from people across the county.
By that afternoon, the Board had voted unanimously to carry on regardless.
That's a bleak way to treat nearly 8,000 people who took the time to raise concerns about their local health services. And there's plenty to be concerned about.
The consultation offers no option to keep beds as they are and instead only offers a choice between losing 56 or losing 86.
This is not a health service awash with spare capacity: bed occupancy across Powys was 91% during 2025.
Whichever option is chosen, the average journey to an inpatient bed will roughly double, with some families facing over 45 minutes each way, in a county with no district general hospital of its own.
What has really troubled me over the past few weeks is the way this consultation is being handled. We've been told repeatedly that the proposals were "driven by staff" and shaped by "thousands" of contributions.
Yet the figures published by the Board appear to account for only around 1,500 responses - while the nurses, paramedics and other care staff who have spoken to David and me directly tell a very different story from one of a workforce driving this change.
Powys is a large, rural county with a small, ageing population spread across a wide area, which inevitably makes care here costlier to deliver than in south Wales's cities.
The Health Board cannot conjure up money it doesn't have. If the Welsh Government wants to protect local health services here, it needs to recognise that cost and put the funding in place - before the beds go, not after.
People know that hard choices are sometimes necessary but what they expect is a fair hearing. Right now, that isn't happening, and that is why I and the Welsh Liberal Democrats will keep making the case for Powys's communities, its patients and its NHS staff.
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