TENBY’S all-weather lifeboat was launched at 6pm on Thursday 20th June, after the Coastguard received a report that a climber had fallen 40ft onto rocks whilst climbing at St Govans.

The RNLI was supported by two helicopters from the Wales Air Ambulance and a coastguard helicopter.

The Welsh Ambulance Service also attended with a road ambulance.

The volunteer crew made best speed to the area, some 12 miles west of the station, as two Wales Air Ambulances, a Coastguard rescue helicopter, a land Ambulance and several coastguard rescue teams also headed to the scene.

Arriving on scene at the same time as the helicopters, two casualty care-trained crew members went ashore in the Y-boat to assist the Coastguard Paramedic, who had been winched down to the casualty.

Once stabilised, more lifeboat crew went ashore to assist in immobilising and carrying the stretcher to a safe area where it could be winched up to the helicopter from.

Once in the air, the injured climber was landed at the top of the cliff where the EMRTS doctor and paramedics were waiting to treat him.

The lifeboat then stood down and returned to station, arriving at 8.20pm.

A great example of multiple agencies working together to assist a casualty.

A NORTH Pembrokeshire motorist has been banned from driving for three years after admitting his second drink-driving offence in ten years.

Trystan Davies, 34, was stopped by officers as he drove his Vauxhall Corsa on the A476 at Cardigan on the evening of June 1.

When spoken to by officers, Davies admitted drinking half a bottle of red wine prior to driving.  However his breath tests showed he was over twice the prescribed drink-drive limit, with a reading of 76 mcg.  The legal limit is 35.

This week Crown Prosecutor Abigail Jackson informed district judge Mark Layton sitting at Haverfordwest magistrates court that Davies, of Parceithin, Blaenffos, was convicted of a previous drink-driving offence in 2019.

After Davies pleaded guilty to the charge of drink-driving his solicitor, Michael Kelleher, claimed the reading was high as his client had been on a drinking spree the night prior to the offence,

However District Judge Mark Layton questioned whether the alcohol would have remained in his system for this length of time.

“The fact that you’ve done it before makes this offence more serious,” commented Judge Layton when passing sentence.

“You should understand that when you drive after consuming alcohol, you don’t just risk your own life but the lives of everyone else.  If you have a drink problem, you need to address it.”

Davies was disqualified from driving for three years.  He was fined £120 and ordered to pay £85 court costs and a £48 surcharge.

• A NEW set of Welsh NHS performance data was released today (Thursday, June 20), and it contains more bad news.

The Welsh Government described the data as “disappointing”.

WG “LACKS GRIP” ON FUNDAMENTALS

Sam Rowlands MS, the Conservatives’ Shadow Health Minister, said: “These atrocious statistics show that the NHS is going backwards under Labour.

“Two-year waiting lists have increased for the first time in two years.

“Keir Starmer has called Labour-run Wales his blueprint for what a UK Labour Government would look like: these figures are a stark warning for the whole UK.”

Mabon ap Gwynfor MS, Plaid Cymru’s health spokesperson, said: “Labour’s complete mismanagement of the NHS in Wales has left us with waiting lists at the highest on record, targets for diagnosis and treatment are being consistently missed, and people are getting stranded in A&E departments for hours on end.

“It’s no wonder that we have such astronomical waiting times when the government has failed to deal with problems in primary care and social care.

“Until the government gets to grip with these fundamental problems, then waiting lists will continue to climb.”

A Welsh Government spokesperson said: “We have made it a priority to reduce long waiting times, and today, the Cabinet Secretary for Health met with health board chairs to instruct them to redouble their efforts to tackle these.

“These figures show the NHS is continuing to manage incredible demand for urgent and emergency care – the number of immediately life-threatening 999 calls in May was 25% higher than the previous year, and demand is nearly two-and-a-half times higher than pre-pandemic levels.”

THE LOCAL PICTURE: HOSPITALS

Over 30% of patients waiting to start treatment in the Hywel Dda UHB area have been waiting for over 36 weeks.

The Health Board has the second-highest proportion of the population waiting to start therapy. In practical terms, that means that around 4,000 people are yet to get the therapy they need.

The number of patients told they did not have it fell. However, the number of patients starting treatment has remained stable for years.

With rising demand for cancer diagnosis and treatment and no improvement in the numbers starting treatment, performance against the target for treating cancer dropped.

At least 75% of patients should start treatment within 62 days of first being suspected of cancer.

Only 42% of cancer patients in the Hywel Dda UHB area started treatment within the target time. To meet a revised target of 80% by 2026, Hywel Dda UHB will have to increase its performance by almost 100%.

The Welsh Government’s performance target for patients waiting to start treatment for less than 26 weeks is 95%.

No Health Board is close to meeting that target, although Hywel Dda UHB is the second-best performer—just over 50% of patients start treatment within six months.

Despite a dramatic fall in the number of inpatient beds in Hywel Dda UHB’s hospitals over the last six years, the number of inpatient admissions rose sharply in April, placing even greater pressure on chronically overstretched staff and resources.

THE LOCAL PICTURE: AMBULANCES

The percentage of red emergency calls being met within eight minutes fell across Wales.

The ambulance performance target is for 65% of all red calls to be attended to within eight minutes.

Across Wales in May, there were 5,110 red (life-threatening) calls to the ambulance service, 13.9% of all calls.

45.8% of red calls received an emergency response within eight minutes, 2.2 percentage points lower than in April.

In the Hywel Dda UHB area, 47.6% of red calls received an emergency response within 8 minutes, compared to a sharply reduced number of calls in the red category.

Examining more detailed data for the Hywel Dda UHB area demonstrates the pressure on emergency hospital admissions and the knock-on effect on the ambulance service.

When an ambulance takes a patient to hospital, admission is supposed to take place within 15 minutes of arrival, with the ambulance returning to service 15 minutes after that.

In the Hywel Dda UHB area, ambulances were tied up beyond those markers for almost 4,000 hours beyond expected admission and return to on-call.

Fewer than 18% of patients conveyed to a Major Injury Department were admitted within 15 minutes. For Major Acute Units, that turnaround was even worse, at barely 15.5%.

Once cleared, however, well over 80% of ambulances were back out on call.

Diving deeper into the data, we see that just over 1,700 patients travelled by ambulance to major emergency, major acute, and maternity and mental health units.

By a very crude piece of arithmetic, we can calculate that if those 1700 patients accounted for the 4000 hours of “lost time”, the handover stats would be even more shocking, with an average turnover of over two hours.

Moreover, localised data shows that 35.6% of all people who are attended by an ambulance go to a hospital using other means of transport.

A CRISIS ACROSS THE BOARD

The issue could not be clearer: delays at hospitals are keeping ambulances off the road.

The upward pressure on A&E services caused by the collapse of out-of-hours primary care (GPs, etc) is driving up attendance at all hospital A&Es.

The lack of beds is driving up a backlog of treatment. The lack of clinical staff means more junior staff fulfil tasks -including initial diagnoses- formerly taken by clinicians and registered nurses. Consolidating rural services on an urban model is making things worse.

Whatever the cure for the disastrous condition of the Welsh NHS, money will not be enough to turn around decades of decline.