A FORMER senior NHS manager intends to move to England following failures in her husband’s treatment for prostate cancer.

Professor Siobhan McClelland, who lives in Manorbier and is a former Vice Chair of Aneurin Bevan Health Board, said: ‘There is neither capacity nor capability in Welsh Government to be making really good health policy.”

When it comes to health policy, Professor McClelland knows the subject well. She formerly held senior positions as a health economist and health manager. Her experiences of working within the Welsh NHS is substantial.

Apart from her experience on the Aneurin Bevan health board, she chaired the Welsh NHS’s emergency ambulance services committee.

Hywel Dda UHB acknowledges ‘shortcomings’ in Professor McClelland’s husband’s treatment.

Speaking to BBC Wales’ Wales Live programme broadcast on Wednesday (Oct 17) Prof McClelland outlined the successive difficulties in getting GP appointments, referrals for diagnosis, and the failure to spot the spread of her husband’s cancer.

She blamed those failings for making an already difficult situation worse.

Siobhan McClelland continued by observing there was ‘a massive disconnect’ between the experience of being a member of a Health Board or – as in her own experience – being Chair of the Emergency Ambulance Committee and the state of services being delivered to the public.

Prof McClelland told the BBC that she and her husband had lost confidence in the healthcare available and that was one of the reasons they placed their house on the market and were looking to move away from the area.

“We’ve got a fundamental problem here with health boards – not in terms of geographical boundary – but in the autonomous way in which they act.”

Professor McClelland’s most telling criticisms were of the way in which Health Boards lacked leadership from the Welsh Government and local accountability.

She told BBC Wales: “We have a void in Welsh Government where robust, rigorous, innovative health policy should be made.”

Her scorn for the Welsh Government’s ‘nothing to do with me, guv’ approach led straight to the door of current Health Secretary Vaughan Gething and his predecessor Mark Drakeford. Both Mr Gething and Prof Drakeford are candidates to lead the Labour Party in Wales and to succeed Carwyn Jones as First Minister.

Claiming that the current organisational setup was convenient for the Welsh Government as it ‘abdicated responsibility for health board services’, Siobhan McClelland said that both Mark Drakeford and Vaughan Gething ‘struggled to implement policy’.

In the Senedd, however, Vaughan Gething rejected Prof McClelland’s criticism out of hand.

Faced with Rhun ap Iorwerth’s assertion that the words of someone as respected as Professor McClelland were ‘about as damning an indictment as you could hear of your running of the Welsh health service’, Vaughan Gething said he did not accept the system-wide criticism that she makes of Welsh health services.

Pressed by Mr ap Iorwerth, Mr Gething sought refuge behind a Parliamentary Review and an OECD report which he claimed justified his response.

Plaid’s health spokesperson mordantly observed that ‘Professor McClelland has looked at the NHS in Wales and how it’s run probably more forensically than anybody else’ and repeated her criticism of a lack of central direction and asked whether the recently announced increase to the health and social care budget would simply be lost in Boards’ poor financial management.

Instead of answering his opposite number, Labour’s Health Minister suggested that Mr ap Iorwerth seemed to be suggesting a cut in health budgets and said: “I am content with the fact that we understand there are real challenges, and we’re not complacent about actually managing and meeting those.”

Having rubbished Professor McClelland’s substantive complaints about the Welsh Government’s mismanagement of the health service and repeating the line that they operated accountably, the Cabinet Secretary lauded the model for the delivery of social care that had been agreed with third sector bodies, local government and health boards.

Bearing in mind the content of most recent local government discussions on that vexed subject, the casual observer might wonder to which local authorities the Welsh Government had been speaking.

Equally, in highlighting the extent of central control and monitoring and by the way he addressed some of Rhun ap Iorwerth’s points, Vaughan Gething appears to have laid the way for future difficulties in claiming the planned cuts to health services by Hywel Dda UHB are nothing to do with him or the Government he wants to lead.

By claiming to have his hands on the levers of healthcare’s delivery, Mr Gething can hardly now claim they are clean when it comes to decisions about the future of West Wales’ health services.