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Welsh government asked to cover Powys Teaching Health Board’s funding shortfall of £9.9m

OPPOSITION parties continued their onslaught on the Welsh government’s record on the NHS in Wales today, claiming that patients in Powys would be forced to wait longer for care because of financial problems.

Welsh Conservative Senedd Member James Evans has called on the Welsh Government to cover Powys Teaching Health Board’s funding shortfall of £9.9 million to prevent deliberate extensions to waiting times for patients in mid Wales.

The issue was also raised in the Senedd during the week as opposition parties claim the Welsh Labour government is failing in its NHS management.

Powys’s health board has discussed plans to tackle NHS funding pressures and is looking at deliberate extensions to waiting times of up to 11 weeks for patients in mid Wales.

The county does not have a district general hospital, so more than half of patients in the area receive care in England.

Mr Evans said: “The board is considering drastic measures, including slowing planned care in England — a move that would harm patients already waiting too long for treatment.”

The issue was raised in questions to Welsh health secretary Jeremy Miles, who said: “I’ve made funding available to the health board which has to do two things: it has to balance its books, and it has to provide timely care for the residents of Powys.”

Opposition parties sense Labour’s vulnerability on its health record and queued up to attack the Welsh government’s handling of the NHS in First Minister’s questions and during Eluned Morgan’s statement on her priorities for 2025.

New Tory leader Darren Millar accused the First Minister of failing to deliver on the NHS.

Mr Millar claimed: “The NHS in Wales is on its knees with one in two ambulances not turning up in time, record-breaking waiting lists and 24,000 people waiting over two years for treatment.”

The FM said the NHS was delivering for the vast majority of the people of Wales, with two million contacts every month in a population of three million. 

Ms Morgan said: “You talk about the need to set up diagnostic facilities. We’d have loved to set up diagnostic facilities before now, but we had no budget because your Conservative government did not give us the capital to allow us to do that.”

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