8. Will the Minister make a statement on the impact of the all-Wales prior approval policy on communities located near the borders of health boards? OQ57268

Health boards are responsible for commissioning services to meet the needs of their local population. The all-Wales prior approval scheme ensures that patients are treated as close to their homes as possible within their own local health board areas.

I am grateful to the Minister. The national policy notes that patients shouldn't access medical treatment in another health board unless all local options are unable to provide that treatment. It has a real impact on communities on the borders of health boards. I'm thinking of Upper Brynamman, for example, in my constituency, where the village is split in two—Lower Brynamman is in the Swansea health board area and Upper Brynamman is in Hywel Dda—which means, of course, that the time to access Glangwili hospital from Upper Brynamman is three times as long as it would take to reach the nearest hospital in Swansea. Since the introduction of this national policy in 2018, local residents do feel that there has been a deterioration in their clinical treatment. So, isn't now the time, Minister, to review the policy in order to ensure that there is a solution that is fair to those communities that happen to be on the borders of our health boards?

Thank you very much. Health boards have to develop services on the basis of the local population, and if patients then ask to go somewhere else, that can have an impact and destabilise services in the two health boards. So, if they've planned for one thing and something else happens, evidently that is going to cause problems. I think that it is important to recognise that if, for example, someone wants to go from the Hywel Dda board area to Swansea, what that would mean in the long term for the hospital in Carmarthen. So, we have to think through the implications. So, what we're trying to do is to get health boards to work on a regional scale, but I do think it's important that people understand that we're doing these things not because we want to make life difficult for people, but to ensure that we can provide a service for everyone and ensure that we can plan services for everyone.

I thank the Minister.