A new hospital alone will not be enough to address our challenges and deliver the vision we aspire to for our communities. That is why our PBC includes a huge focus on improvements in the heart of our communities, and support for our strategy to shift focus to prevention, early intervention, and care as close to home as possible.
If supported, a new hospital will however provide many opportunities for us to improve care for our population. Glangwili and Withbush Hospitals are some of the oldest in Wales and don’t meet the standards for modern health care buildings. This impacts on patient experience and the quality of services we can provide. Equally the duplication of services across sites means many are fragile and don’t have the necessary scale to provide care in the way we would want (7-day cover for example).
We also believe there are additional services we could offer from a new hospital, within the boundaries of Hywel Dda, which we are not able to now. We are keen to explore, in conjunction with Swansea Bay University Health Board, options for providing some tertiary services, for example radiotherapy, neurology services, and cardiac catheterisation services. Each of these services is being reviewed regionally through the ARCH partnership.
The experience we have seen in other places where there has been a new hospital is that staff want to go and work there as they have the latest facilities and technologies. It would also allow us to offer more attractive rotas to medical staff and trainees. We propose to have a health education, academic and research and innovation facilities on the site, including an Institute for Life Sciences. It is not just about doctors; we have had discussions and want to work closely with health sciences to train and attract nurses and therapists too.
By having a stable workforce, we will have more senior, specialists available at the front door so patients have quick access to them, as well as all the support services needed. We will also reduce our reliance on temporary staff, which is costly and can result in less safe service provision.
Finally, by separating planned and emergency care, as we intend to at the new hospital, we will avoid the risk of emergency activity negatively impacting on planned care, through cancelled operations.