Gwyn Williams

A Senedd member and practising ophthalmologist on the data that was missing from Welsh eye care, and what he wants done about it.

Part of the OpenEyes Conference interview series, recorded on 16 September 2026 in Cardiff, UK.

Digitising Welsh Eye Care: Data as the Basis for Reform

Data is key. You can only fix the problems you can see, and many things were being hidden in the dark.

About Gwyn Williams

Gwyn Williams is a Senedd Member for Plaid Cymru and has been a consultant ophthalmologist for the past ten years at Singleton Hospital in Swansea, where he still works one session a week.

Interview summary

Gwyn Williams describes approaching ophthalmology reform as a clinician and finding that a clinician's voice carried only so far. Politicians had been lobbied for years with little changing, and he traces that to an absence of data: waiting times, the interval from referral to the start of treatment, and similar measures were unavailable because the records were on paper. Each time government asked a health board a question, the answer had to be assembled by hand, and what came back did not necessarily reflect the truth.

He presents OpenEyes as the instrument for closing those gaps, and is direct about why earlier digital spending did not deliver: a central solution in Wales had to pass seven health boards, seven committees and seven IT teams, which reached seven different conclusions about the same problem. He credits the preceding government with being unable to fix what it could not see, and names James Morgan's persistence as the reason digitisation happened at all.

On why this system rather than the alternatives: it is open source, it can be changed, and Welsh clinicians chose it in an options appraisal in which commercial products were considered and rejected. He adds that some ophthalmologists still prefer other systems.

Asked what follows if the work stops, he says nothing would improve, publicly provided health care would fail, and care would fall back to a patchwork in which those with money pay and those without go blind. His single wish is for IT to be taken from the health boards and run on an all-Wales basis, with simplified boundaries - noting that Greater Manchester, with a population comparable to the whole of Wales, has one NHS trust.