North Wales Assembly Member Mark Isherwood has appealed to the Welsh Government to act on the calls of North Wales patients for improved resources in Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board.
Speaking in this week’s Business Statement, Mr Isherwood said he has received many emails from constituents expressing concern about services within the Health Board and offering suggestions on how they might be improved.
He called for a Welsh Government Statement on ‘Resources in Besti Cadwaladr University Health Board’ and referred to one particular email from a patient’s wife who is also an experienced a Registered Nurse.
Speaking in the Chamber, he said:
“I receive many e-mails from constituents, whether that's patients, family members or staff, who, based on their own experience, wish to share suggestions for how services might be improved in the Health Board.
“I'll only quote one of those, received this month: 'Just before Christmas, my husband became ill with a serious chest infection, which became pneumonia. He had a total of three admissions to the Emergency Department. On the third occasion, he was eventually admitted to the High Dependency Unit, where he received excellent care. However, the fact that on three occasions he was, in my opinion as an experienced Registered Nurse, not well triaged. The Matron of the unit was working extremely hard to move patients through the department and she was introducing herself to patients. However she did not seem to be getting a lot of support from her junior staff. She apologised for the state of the department, which was obviously desperately overstretched. I hope that she is given the time and the resources to sort this department out. Please can you do something to help her, by asking the Welsh Government to urgently put more resources into Glan Clwyd? Not just by throwing money at the problem, but by ensuring that the money available is spent on opening beds in the main hospital and also in the community hospitals, so that people are not occupying beds in the acute sector when they really need community hospital care. I am thankful to the staff and consultants in the High Dependency Unit for the fact that my husband is still alive, but I feel that he is lucky to be so after what he has been through in the Emergency Department. I hope that this e-mail is taken note of, for the sake of all of us who live in Flintshire, Denbighshire and Conwy’.”
“I call for a Statement in that context, not just about the totality of money spent but, in this context, responding to suggestions about how that money might be spent better”.
The Minister for Finance and Trefnydd, Rebecca Evans AM, asked Mr Isherwood to “share the correspondence that he's received with me and with the Minister for Health so that we can consider it more fully”.
She added: “I know that the Health Minister would want to consider it in the context of his efforts in North Wales as well. But I think that Mark Isherwood's point does really speak to the importance of the patient voice and the user experience within the NHS, and the fact that, by capturing that, we can certainly look to continue to make the improvements that patients and their families would expect. So, that kind of contribution, I think, will be really useful and I look forward to receiving that and any other similar contributions that Mark Isherwood has that he wants to draw to our attention”.
Mr Isherwood added:
“Whilst I welcome the Minister’s statement that she will consider this, Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board is in its fifth year of special measures, under direct Welsh Government control, and my constituent concluded her email to me with ‘I am sure many are dying unnecessarily because of the mismanagement’ ”.
