Meddygfa’r Sarn would stay open on every weekday under the plan to merge it with Kidwelly’s surgery, but its doors would shut at 3pm.
Anyone in Pontyates needing an urgent appointment after that would be seen in Kidwelly instead. Hywel Dda University Health Board set out the hours today as it opened four weeks of engagement on the proposal.
The surgery’s own practice leaflet has its doors open from 8.30am to 6pm. The proposed hours are 9am to 3pm, with GP surgeries and nurse clinics running every day.
The board had not said what hours the Pontyates branch would keep when it announced the merger plan in October. It said then that the details would be worked out through the engagement.
One permanent GP between 13,000 patients
Under the proposal, Meddygfa’r Sarn would merge its patient list with Meddygfa Minafon, the health board-run practice in Kidwelly, and carry on as a branch. Minafon would keep its 8am to 6.30pm day and its Trimsaran branch would stay open from 9am to 4pm, leaving Pontyates with the shortest hours of the three.
The board calls this “a more sustainable model”. The figures it is working with are these: when the area’s councillors last described Minafon, in October, it had more than 8,500 patients and one permanent GP.
Sarn has had no salaried GP since February 2025 and runs on locums. The board’s own January paper put its running costs at more than £1m a year, almost half of it on locum sessions.
Freedom of Information documents obtained by campaigners showed no targeted recruitment for a Sarn GP in nine years, only circular letters to locums already on the board’s books. The same documents had Minafon 83 per cent reliant on locums.
The board has not said how many GPs the merged practice would have, or how it plans to recruit them. Nor has it said what happens to the building: January’s paper had the lease on the Pontyates surgery running out in October 2026, and today’s announcement does not mention it.
It was a Vacant Practice Panel that recommended closing the surgery in January, arguing that a merged practice of about 13,000 patients spread across several sites would bring its own problems. After nobody bid to take over the surgery when the contract went out to tender in July, a panel now recommends exactly that.
The question the politicians asked, part-answered
Six Plaid Cymru politicians wrote to the board last month asking whether every service at the surgery would stay in the village, and whether full details would be published before patients were asked for their views. Today’s announcement answers the first in part: not after 3pm.
Andrew Carruthers, the board’s chief operating officer, said: “We heard clearly how important it is to local people that GP services continue to be available in Pontyates.” He said the board wanted to hear from patients of both surgeries “before any decisions are made”.
How to have your say before 29 November
The engagement runs from today, Monday 2 November, until Sunday 29 November. There is a drop-in session at Pontyates Welfare Hall on Heol y Meinciau on Friday 20 November, from 1.30pm to 6.30pm, and an online session at 6.30pm on Tuesday 24 November, with the link available by emailing hyweldda.engagement@wales.nhs.uk.
There is a questionnaire on the board’s Have Your Say website, paper copies in collection boxes at the Sarn, Minafon and Trimsaran surgeries, an email address, ask.hdd@wales.nhs.uk, and a phone line, 0300 303 8322, option 5. Feedback can also go through Llais, the patient voice body.
The last time the health board held a drop-in in the village, in February, residents queued outside a packed hall while more than 100 people formed a human chain around the surgery.
No final decision has been made, the board says. A report is due to go to the board in January 2027, and in October it said any new arrangement would start from 1 April.
The surgery has about 4,350 patients and has been run directly by the health board since its GP partners resigned in 2017. The board dropped its closure plan in May after four months of protest.
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