NEW HOSPITAL: The hospital that would end A&E in Carmarthen and Haverfordwest is at least seven years away

The most controversial building project in west Wales has a number on it again: at least seven years.

Hywel Dda’s plan for a new urgent and planned care hospital near St Clears or Whitland is given “an indicative timeline of approximately 7 to 7.5 years”, including around three years of construction, in the chief executive’s report to Thursday’s board meeting.

Counted from today, that means the hospital would not open until around 2033 or 2034.

The controversy runs through every part of the project: where the hospital would be built, how long it would take patients to reach it, and what happens to the hospitals it would replace.

Under the plan, accident and emergency would leave both Glangwili Hospital in Carmarthen and Withybush Hospital in Haverfordwest, with the two district generals downgraded to community hospitals.

Campaigners and local politicians have repeatedly warned of the consequences: significantly longer journeys to emergency care, projected travel times that hit hardest in places like Llanelli and Ammanford, and questions over how patients without a car would reach a rural site by public transport.

Hywel Dda University Health Board has argued the opposite case just as consistently: a purpose-built hospital would meet modern standards, help attract scarce staff, and offer more specialist services than its ageing sites can.

The project’s history is a saga in itself. The health board consulted on possible locations in early 2023, settling the search on the St Clears to Whitland corridor.

By last autumn the plan had been pushed back by at least a decade, with the chief executive making a “strong case” for immediate investment in existing hospitals instead.

Then in March, Welsh Labour’s election manifesto changed the weather: a £4bn “Hospitals for the Future Fund” including a hospital development in west Wales, alongside a new University Hospital of Wales and a rebuilt Wrexham Maelor.

The new timeline is the board’s first since that pledge, and the papers propose combining two Treasury-style approval stages, the strategic outline case and outline business case, to move faster on paper.

Money remains the hard question: the same board papers carry a letter from the NHS Wales chief executive saying the health board has breached its statutory duty over its finances.

While the region waits, the health board is reorganising around its existing hospitals, with Glangwili set to become the regional hub for emergency surgery under the Clinical Services Plan, and some interim changes on long horizons of their own: a rural intensive care model for Bronglais and Withybush is not pencilled in until 2031/32.

Which means the arguments that have followed this project for years, where emergency care lives and how far patients must travel to reach it, will run for at least another seven.

The board meets at 10.15am on Thursday at Ceredigion County Council’s chambers in Aberaeron, streamed online.