Extra £27m for health board to help improve services
A HEALTH board has been given £27m of additional funding to help improve NHS services in the region.
An independent review was carried out into Hywel Dda University Health Board following concerns over how much money it was spending.
It found that demographics and scale were the two main factors in the health board generating “excess costs that were unavoidable”.
Two other factors, remoteness and efficiency, were found not to have generated excess costs for the health board.
Commenting on the review, carried out by Deloitte LLP, Health Secretary Vaughan Gething said: “The review partially confirms the view that Hywel Dda faces a unique set of healthcare challenges that have contributed to the consistent deficits incurred by the board and its predecessor organisations.
“In response to these findings, I have approved the release of £27m additional recurrent funding to the health board.
“This places the health board on a fair funding basis compared to other health boards by funding the excess costs identified in the review and provides a sound footing for the board to develop and transform services.
“Following my decision to fund the identified excess costs for healthcare in mid and west Wales, I now expect the board to focus on the costs that the review indicate were within their control to manage and deliver on the efficiencies that it identified.”
In April Hywel Dda University Health Board unveiled three options it is considering for the future provision of healthcare in Carmarthenshire, Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion.
In all three options, Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest would no longer be a general hospital. It would instead become a community hospital for minor injuries which would have the ability to carry out scans and certain tests.
As for Carmarthen’s Glangwili Hospital, it would lose its A&E facility.
In response to the Deloitte review and the additional funding, Steve Moore, chief executive at Hywel Dda, said: “We welcome this additional funding from Welsh Government which recognises our ongoing financial challenges in providing healthcare in a mainly rural setting across a large expanse of Wales.
“The review confirms, as we have detailed in our current public consultation Our Big NHS Change, that we have unique challenges in Hywel Dda to provide care within our current service models and resources.
“For example, it is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain services across four main hospital sites, to attract and retain substantive staff and to provide the right care in the right settings to meet the needs of our growing older and frailer population.
“Reaching financial stability is an ongoing challenge for us, but our turnaround programme continues to address and make efficiencies, whilst our consultation represents our strategic approach to address this in the long term.
“Our focus is to organise our services so that they are safe and sustainable and provide quality healthcare and good outcomes for patients.
“Part of this is ensuring we make the best use of the money available to us for the benefit of our patients.”