A key part of our A Healthier Mid and West Wales strategy is to bring care closer to home and reduce travel for unnecessary hospital admissions or long lengths of stay.
Our Programme Business Case (opens in new window), includes significant investment in community facilities close to where you live. This will ensure that you can continue to receive your care mostly in your own home and communities, or from more local hospitals.You would also come back to these local facilities and services or your own home, more quickly after a stay in hospital. Our aim is for people to need only a short stay in our Urgent and Planned Care Hospital (72 hours).
We have heard that transport and access to the new Urgent and Planned Care Hospital, in an emergency or for planned care, is a cause of concern to staff and our communities.
It is critical that patients, staff, and visitors can access services, including our hospitals. Our new Urgent and Planned Care Hospital needs to be accessible with good transport links.
One of our challenges is that we provide healthcare services across a large area, quarter the landmass of Wales, in mainly rural places. Having many facilities across our area reduces travel time, but means our clinical services are more fragile.
To address concerns about our plans for a new hospital, regardless of the three specific sites, we are developing a Transport and Accessibility Strategy. This will set out our vision for transport to the hospital and our community services. Transport is broad and would cover issues such as emergency and non-emergency patient transport, public and community transport, staff travel, decarbonisation, car parking and taxi or courier provision.