Health Matters Column: Are the new clinical rooms at Leighton Buzzard Health Clinic, delivering 56,000 appointments for local people?
It was publicised to be a major improvement for the town in its BLMK ICB Annual Report Summary for 2024/25 but when we asked for confirmation of the actual appointment numbers being delivered in the first 6 months, we were initially advised that they could not provide an accurate report as some rooms were subcontracted.
We raised this at the ICB Board meeting and joined a group of concerned residents who spent a week outside the clinic counting the number of patients who visited, the results were significantly lower than we anticipated and as the Associate Director of System & ICB Estates finally confirmed at the Health & Wellbeing Meeting in January,10,000 appointments had been delivered over 6 months within 5 rooms.
We do not wish to sound totally negative as 3,084 patients had their Blood tests locally and a Diabetic Retinopathy Service now uses one of the PCN rooms twice per month and we always want to acknowledge the dedication of our town’s health teams who maximise the local service resources and appointment availability.
But we now feel compelled to express our constant frustrations with the Systems and ICB Estate Team who have a bad habit of presenting everything in its most positive light whilst withholding details that these capacity improvements are still dependent on future staff recruitment and should use language that is not ambiguous, with accurate statistics residents can readily understand.
Central Bedfordshire represents the largest population (27%) of this ICB Region, but it has not received anywhere near that percentage of infrastructure investment in the past 15 years and will not receive that share of investment in the next 10 years either.
We were also told at the Health & Wellbeing meeting that as the ICB was awaiting the outcome of the 10-year CBC Housing Development Plan when the proposed sites will emerge and will provide feedback on the short list proposed, this contradicts our own conversations with the ICB concerning a request to visit the Clipstone and Vandyke Road sites that were once ear marked for potential Health Infrastructure projects.
The ICB in reply to our site visit request stated:
“We are keen to minimise any unrealistic expectations as best as possible. There are no plans for the [Vandyke Road] site at this stage, and we have confirmed that a new health building is unaffordable so I don't consider that a visit would be helpful. Our position remains the same on this’
So regardless of whether 500 or 5,000 new homes are built near here we see no contingency plans for our town apart from maybe another 3 rooms allocated into the new Sports Centre at Clipstone.
Sadly, our Council Executive doesn’t appear to be doing much to question these statements or challenge the ICB about the status quo of “add services hospital adjacent”
It shouldn’t be the role of small campaign groups in communities around Central Bedfordshire to do this on behalf of its council?