Will Hayward

My piece “Living and dying in pain” looked at the waiting lists in Wales. Through a series of FOIs I demonstrated that a huge contributor to the fall in Welsh waiting lists was people dying while waiting for treatment (no other journalist had made this link). My FOIs also demonstrated that the Welsh Government was hiding behind their “over two year wait” categorisation and that in fact some patients had waited up to six years. I then used my digital skills to produce interactive graphs to show these findings in an engaging way.

I also tracked down to several people who had spent years on waiting lists to show a human side to this story. This was just one of many special reports I put together on the Welsh NHS over the past year putting the NHS scandal at the forefront of political debate. My piece on the Welsh NHS being on its knees sought to answer one of the biggest political questions facing Wales - who is to blame for our failing health service? The UK Government never misses an opportunity to criticise the performance of the Welsh NHS which is run by Labour. By the same token the Welsh Government consistently blames the shortcomings in the health service on a lack of funding coming from Westminster.

This leaves the people of Wales with a total lack of accountability. No one is willing to accept responsibility meanwhile the people of Wales are left to suffer and die on waiting lists that refuse to come down. So what is the answer? Who is to blame? Both sides hide behind the opaque way in which the funding of the devolved nations is carried out. I spent months going through Treasury documents and technical briefings to work out where the money was going. Eventually I felt comfortable enough to say that they are both to blame.

The next challenge was how to tell a story that is essentially about figures and data in a way that is accessible to the public. I feel I did this well. The piece was incredibly well received with over 200,000 views in the first few weeks. My piece on Betsi sought to tell the story of Wales’ largest public sector organisation. The challenge here was pulling together a decade of stories and scandals - many of whom the health board did not want in the public domain. The key to this story was demonstrating that the Welsh Government had tried to distance themselves from the thing they were responsible for. Doing this involved hours of going through the transcripts of Senedd debates and committees to pull together the quotes to show that they had consistently tried to dodge responsibility.