SWAT visit Senedd (From Western Telegraph)

SWAT visit Senedd

9:02am Tuesday 16th October 2007 in

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Members of the Save Withybush Action Team are visiting the Welsh Assembly today to meet with health minister Edwina Hart and voice their opposition to the merger of the three west Wales NHS trusts.

The proposed merger of the trusts for Pembrokeshire, Ceredigion and Carmarthenshire was overwhelmingly voted against during the Designed to Deliver public consultation meetings in Pembrokeshire last year.

Pembrokeshire Community Health Council also voted against the April 1st merger at their meeting last week.

The majority said that they saw nothing in the latest report of the Merger Project Team to justify amalgamation and no convincing argument in a recent project by team director Keith Thompson.

SWAT maintain that the creation of a "monstrous super trust" is the biggest threat to local health services. They say that the trust would have a debt of £42 million, with £14m coming from Pembrokeshire and Derwen, at its conception.

"It is claimed that the merger will save money, that management numbers will be trimmed," said a spokesman for SWAT.

"Whenever trusts are merged it is amazing how the opposite of this occurs."

Health minister Edwina Hart said in a debate in the Senedd that there was "No question of anything happening" to alter services or their location as a result of the merger.

"I see this as an administrative merger of Trust boards and the streamlining of administrative structures," she said.