Health trust 'can't say' how many new appointments created by extra rooms at Leighton Buzzard clinic
A lack of resources means data around the volume of extra appointments at Leighton Buzzard Health Centre “cannot be 100 per cent scientific”, a meeting heard.
Health campaigners and local councillors across the town have been demanding clarity from BLMK integrated care board (ICB) about the number of extra appointments annually to be provided at the Bassett Road clinic.
Seven more rooms were unveiled there this summer, with the Secretary of State for Health Wes Streeting promising this investment would deliver “56,000 additional appointments for local patients every year”.
Rosemarie Gunter, from the Leighton Linslade health provision group and patients of Leighton Buzzard, told Central Bedfordshire Council’s social care, health and housing overview and scrutiny committee: “This calculation of 56,000 more appointments annually doesn’t seem possible.
“Can the ICB confirm these will be extra appointments?” she asked. “Some of those would take longer than the suggested 15 minutes.
“The primary care network is doing a fantastic job being innovative and patient centred. But we know not all the seven rooms have been allocated to it.”
Liberal Democrat Leighton Linslade South councillor Emma Holland-Lindsay said: “Residents have been promised this will increase capacity and we need to know when and how, and whether it’s delivering.”
BLMK ICB associate director of estates Nikki Barnes explained: “Five new clinical rooms have been created upstairs at the health centre to be used exclusively by the primary care network to increase the capacity of the services it operates.
“A minimum of three of those rooms will be used for its same day minor illness service, which began in January. Other services provided include phlebotomy, cancer care and social prescribing appointments. Before it was constrained for capacity.
“One room downstairs will be used by Bedfordshire Hospitals Trust to expand the physiotherapy services it provides. Splitting a room doubles its offer for therapy provision locally.
“The seventh room will be used to increase the capacity for a wide range of community services, such as nurse-led speciality clinics, speech and language therapy services, and a children’s eye clinic.
“That room will be used flexibly, depending on the number of service referrals. We’re hopeful this will reduce demand pressures for those services. We’ll see how we can continually improve the data and help you to understand how those rooms are being used.
“But I can’t commit that we’ll set up a bespoke data collection and monitoring system for the health centre because we simply don’t have the resources to do that. We’re confident these extra seven clinical rooms are a valuable development for the town.”
Councillor Holland-Lindsay, who chairs the committee, added: “A promise has been made about the (appointments) delivery and then the ICB says ‘we can’t tell you’, so if you can’t measure what’s being delivered how do we know?”
Ms Barnes replied: “These are fair assumptions, although we can’t be 100 per cent scientific. We’ve had positive messages from the primary care network around data collection for its five rooms.
“We’re doing all we can within our resources towards getting the level of detail which the local community wants.”
The committee recommended the ICB provides its “best breakdown of how those clinical rooms are being used”.