ADAM’S CHARITY SHOP, HAVERFORDWEST

A LOCAL charity, Adam’s Bucketful of Hope, has asked the Local Health Board to refund money given to it to fund cancer treatment at Withybush Hospital. 

During his treatment for leukaemia, Adam Evans-Thomas campaigned vigorously to persuade the then government to pay the costs of DNA tests for bone marrow donors and, through his campaigning zeal, also helped enlist 3,000 people on to the bone marrow register. During the later stages of his illness, Adam established the Bucketful of Hope appeal, to raise money to refurbish Ward Ten at Withybush Hospital and support the construction of a new Cancer Day Unit (CDU). Adam died of leukaemia in 2004 but his campaign was continued by his mother, Chris. The charity has raised just under £650,000 towards the costs of refurbishing and building cancer facilities at Withybush Hospital. But now Chris Evans-Thomas is asking for the money back. Gross delay in the Health Board even agreeing the location of a new CDU over the last ten years has exhausted her patience. In an interview, she said that she had been given several dates for the works to start on a CDU but that nothing had ever been done to realise those plans. As a result, of the Health Board’s failure to act, she has now asked for the money back so she can crack on with fulfilling Adam’s wish to provide cancer services within Pembrokeshire. The Herald understands that the Board is unlikely to agree to her request. The Local Health Board has claimed, as it has in relation to cutting other services at Withybush Hospital that staff shortages and recruitment problems have delayed refurbishing Ward Ten and building a CDU. The Board has, however, been widely and repeatedly criticised for its apathetic recruitment practices and has been alleged by some campaigners to have engineered staff shortages to justify its plans to shift essential services away from Withybush to Glangwili, where the Chemotherapy Day Unit was refitted in 2011. The situation has been muddied by the failure of the Board to ring fence money raised to provide services in Pembrokeshire. The Board amalgamated its various charitable funds into the Hywel Dda General Fund in March 2012, with a pot for cancer treatment ACROSS the Health Board area, and now touts for donations to this charity. Hywel Dda claims that £550,000 has been dedicated to refurbishing Ward 10 at Withybush and to building a Cancer Day Unit. A spokesperson for the Board said: “The capital build is only part of the challenge as all service/units that we provide require a review of staffing to ensure that they are sustainable in the long term. “We continue to work hard with colleagues, partner organisations and stakeholders, including our charitable fundraisers, to ensure we provide the best care possible for cancer patients and will continue to work closely with them on the development of the new chemotherapy day unit.” Local campaigner Lyn Neville is unimpressed by the Board’s stance: “A Hywel Dda Charitable Funds Committee Summary Report written in 2010 stated that a decision could not be made until after the clinical review had concluded in Summer 2011. Assurances were given that the Cancer Day Unit was NOT under threat and the Chairman, Mr Chris Martin, agreed to issue a statement to provide assurance to the local population. The statement never happened and three years on still nothing happens with the CDU and Ward 10. “As it happens, Board minutes from September last year say that the announcement of £550,000 of funding in Pembrokeshire is intended to ‘appease’ local sentiment.” If that was the Board’s plan, it has spectacularly backfired. As the Herald previously reported, a further review of Cancer Services – initiated only in the last few months – is now not scheduled to report until the end of 2014. In relation to that review, a Health Board spokesperson said: “This process is not about reducing the service we offer but is about creating a more sustainable, high quality service. This may mean the way we deliver cancer services may change.” The failure to update oncology services at Withybush are rendered even more shocking in light of the Herald’s recent revelation that the Board had not advertised in good time for a replacement for cancer specialist Dr Anne Barnes MBE, who earlier this year told the Board she was retiring. A check carried out on the Health Board’s jobs website shows that while a recruitment advert for a number of general medical posts is online, the closing date for applications is July 6, with new staff unlikely to be in post much before this September. In November 2013 it emerged that outpatient appointments at Withybush Hospital for cancer sufferers had been capped. As a result, instead of attending in Haverfordwest, some patients and staff were required make a three and a half hour round trip to Prince Philip Hospital, Llanelli twice a month.