A CARDIGAN woman has branded as ‘ridiculous’ Hywel Dda health authority paying for people to have their say on its Big Change proposals.

The authority is currently carrying out a 12-week public consultation into plans for a radical shake-up of health service provision across Ceredigion, Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire, which could lead to the downgrading of Glangwili and Withybush Hospitals and a new hospital being built between St Clears and Whitland.

The woman in Cardigan, who does not wish to be named, was contacted by telephone by an organisation which said it was acting on behalf of the health board.

“They asked me if I could go to a meeting in Cardigan and that they would pay me £40,” she said.

“I thought I was imagining it and then I thought it was some sort of scam. I just could not believe it.

“You have to wonder, if you get 100 people to talk to, who is paying for all this? It will cost a fortune and it seems ridiculous to me when they are also staging all these public meetings.

“I also wonder how they got my number, although earlier that day I had to ring Glangwili Hospital, could not get through to who I needed to talk to and ended up talking to the complaints department.”

A spokesman for Hywel Dda confirmed it was using an outside company to undertake research as part of its far-reaching consultation – and that people could be paid if contacted.

A statement said: “Opinion Research Services (ORS) is independently undertaking focus group research and is one of the many ways in which feedback is being gathered in our Big NHS Change consultation.

“The focus groups allow extensive explanation of the consultation issues and detailed reasons for proposed changes; ensure participants can consider these issues in depth and fully explore the arguments and reasons for different people’s opinions, which are given on a fully informed basis.

“ORS generally uses a range of methods to recruit focus group participants including face to face, on-street recruitment, telephone recruitment and postal invitation letters.

“The primary method used for this consultation is Random Digit Dialling (RDD) via a telephone call centre in Swansea. This is standard across the research industry and is considered the best way of ensuring as random a recruitment as possible.

“Financial constraints should not be a barrier to people having their voices heard, and an incentive payment is routinely used to compensate people for giving up several hours of their time, and to cover any necessary expenses for travel and childcare etc.

“The level of £40 is lower than would often be used elsewhere in market research and is necessary for the reasons already outlined.

“The payment of participant incentives for focus groups is standard industry good practice for the reasons outlined above. Equally importantly, without incentives it is very difficult to achieve a representative cross-section of the general public people to attend each event; it would be more likely to recruit only people that already had a particular interest.

“As such, incentives are essential to the success of this important element of the consultation programme, and so form part of Hywel Dda University Health Board’s overall consultation budget.

"Anyone who is invited to take part in this way would be offered the £40 payment for taking part, as outlined in our FAQs. ORS are targeting certain demographics who are currently underrepresented in feedback given so far."