What happens if we don't change
If we do nothing, we will not be able to deal with the growing demand for health services, or address our problems in keeping and recruiting staff and making our services more stable. This is likely to lead to:
- longer waiting times at Emergency Departments
- more operations in hospitals being postponed
- insufficient hospital beds
- missed opportunities to prevent illness or avoid deterioration
- worsening infrastructure and technological capability
- greater problems being able to recruit and keep appropriate qualified doctors, nurses, and healthcare professionals to care for you
- fragile services, meaning higher risk of unplanned service change or cuts with the stopping of some services or medical procedures and may mean patients travelling further, even to neighbouring health boards.
Most importantly, doing nothing would likely mean:
- lower safety standards
- worsening impact on health
- reduced survival rates
We do not want to see this happen and our strategy seeks to change our services to meet the needs of future generations.
