From
Iechyd Da: The State of our Health
by Gareth H. Williams, Planet 133:

Disease and premature death have been woven into the fabric of Welsh society during the twentieth century. For many, death has been the end of a journey fraught with hardship and hazard: on hill farms and fishing boats, in slate quarries, steelworks and coal mines... In mining communities the routine burden of illness and death among individuals was punctuated, as at Senghennydd in 1913 and Aberfan in 1966, by catastrophic loss of life. History is what you live and it leaves its mark on how you die. Much of the premature death has been amongst men, but the 1996 edition of Emyr Humphreys' novel Outside the House of Baal reminds us that women, burdened with domestic and family responsibilites, were in some ways even harder hit than men by the conditions in the industrial valleys of the inter-war period, and that: "As early as 1928 it was noted that mothers of young children suffer to an extraordinary degree from general weakness and fatigue". The story of health in Wales is part and parcel of the history of industry and empire, capital and labour, gender and social relationships, and the effects of these on the lives of working people.

...In 1998 no less than in 1928, a woman caring for three young children who walks through the door of her local health centre feeling desperately tired all the time carries her life on her back. The test of the Government's new health policies will be whether she is offered more than peremptory advice to stop smoking or a prescription for tranquillizers. The hope and the promise of the Government's health strategy is that opportunity structures such as the Healthy Living Centres and Healthy Community Projects described in the Green Paper can be created in local communities to offset the most health damaging effects of global, social and economic change.

At this point in Welsh history the key opportunity structure is the National Assembly. It is the Assembly which will have ultimate responsibility for ensuring that targets for health improvement are met, and that sufficient resources are provided from within its overall budget to achieve this. If it can be made to work - and it is a big if - the Assembly will provide a constitutional framework within which community involvement and democratic participation in health and other services relevant to health can be developed; and it will provide the foundation for more effective partnership across those agencies relevant to the varied communities of which Wales consists. Without tax-varying or law-making powers, opportunities for innovation will be limited. However, if the Assembly can develop policies that begin to invest in the reduction of social and economic inequalities and build democratic, locally accountable health services it will be making a major contribution to extending Aneurin Bevan's original vision. It may even help to alter the history we live, and change for the better the health and well-being of the people of Wales.