We need health care to respect the reality of life in rural Wales

'Cancer does not care where you live. We must ensure that our health system does'

- Sioned Williams is Plaid Cymru MS for South Wales West

I WANT to begin with a story.

John is a farmer from a small village in the north of Wales. When he first noticed that something wasn’t right - the weight loss, the pain, the fatigue - he told himself it was stress. Long hours, lambing season, no time to take a day. Certainly no time to travel two hours to a hospital.

So he waited and before long five months had passed. When he finally made the journey to seek help, he was told he had bowel cancer which had already spread to his liver.

John later said: “Farmers keep everything inside.”

We often think of health inequalities solely in terms of factors like poverty, gender or age, but today I'd like to focus on inequalities based on geographic location.

The point about rural Wales is that it doesn’t have the cities, the hospitals and the major transport routes that other parts of Wales has.