NHS chief f lees Wales to get better cancer care for husband
A SENIOR NHS adviser in Wales has revealed she is moving to England to get better cancer treatment for her husband.
Professor Siobhan McClelland condemned the management of NHS Wales as ‘fundamentally flawed’ and launched a stinging attack on the Labour-run devolved government over failings she blamed for affecting patients’ lives.
The Oxford-educated professor, who has been one of the NHS’s top policy makers and administrators in Wales for the past 30 years, said: ‘We have put our house on the market. We’ve lost confidence and trust in the healthcare system here – not the staff. The healthcare system here is a key factor in our decision to move.’
Her husband, who she did not publicly name, is suffering with advanced prostate cancer.
He declined to elaborate on mistakes made in his care when contacted at their home in a coastal village near Tenby, Pembrokeshire. However, it is understood he experienced delays getting GP appointments and a scan was misread that meant the spreading cancer was not spotted. His local health board, Hywel Dda, has since apologised.
‘ My husband has been diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer,’ Professor McClelland told the BBC. ‘It’s been a very difficult journey. It would be for anybody in those circumstances, but it’s been made much harder because of problems in the system.
‘The difficulty in the first place in getting a GP appointment and getting referred into the hospital system, then, having had a scan, finding that it has been misread and the spread of the cancer not recognised.
‘All those things made a situation that was always going to be hard, much more difficult.
‘We live in a beautiful place but can’t enjoy that if we are so anxious about what might happen.’
Professor McClelland has been a senior manager in the former Gwent health authority and sits on the NHS Wales emergency ambulance services committee.
She was also professor of health policy at the Welsh Institute for Health and Social Care and served on the Aneurin Bevan University health board. But she said politicians struggle to get health boards to ‘do what they want’ and it was ‘convenient’ for ministers to abdicate responsibility when things went wrong.
‘We have a void in Welsh government where health policy should be made,’ she added. ‘There is neither capacity nor, I’d suggest, sufficient capability in Welsh government to be making really good health policy.
‘The way the system is structured is fundamentally flawed. And that is impacting on patients and their families.’ Problems in the Welsh NHS have
‘Fundamentally flawed system’
been well documented in recent years, which has been run by the Welsh parliament since devolution in 1999.
Doctors’ leaders previously described it as in ‘meltdown’, and in 2015 a report revealed the target for treating cancer cases referred by GPs had not been met for seven years. Many Welsh patients have also moved to England for access to specialist drugs denied in Wales. Professor McClelland’s comments sparked a row in the Welsh parliament. Rhun ap Iorwerth, health spokesman for Plaid Cymru, told health secretary Vaughan Gething they were ‘as damning an indictment as you could hear of your running of the Welsh NHS’.
But Mr Gething rejected Professor McClelland’s criticism, saying he did not recognise her description of a flawed NHS.