Edenbridge Memorial Health Centre

In 2017, you told us that the most important things to consider when planning future care for the area was reducing travel and designing healthcare services to meet changing needs. That is why putting in a variety of services under one roof, as well as providing space for the community to use when they are not needed for clinical appointments, will create a community hub which supports everyone who lives in the town.

What we are proposing is additional services including:

• extended day centre for dementia patients from three to six days
• increased diagnostics, including ultrasound
• wider range of outpatient services
• community space for use by the community at evenings and weekends
• wider range of outpatient clinics so you don’t have to travel to other hospitals
• increase in One You services, like health checks, stop smoking etc
• extra children’s services, including antenatal clinics
• same day care clinics for things like falls, frailty or continence problems provided by a new proactive frailty team.

You will find more information in the booklet:

• Edenbridge - have your say booklet
• Edenbridge - have your say (easy read)

GP surgery

The GP surgery will continue to offer face-to-face, phone and video appointments for patients, giving the patient the choice of how they want to access their doctor.

There will also be opportunities for more clinical services such as wound management clinics, management of chronic diseases, antenatal care, children’s immunisation, health and wellbeing support, memory and dementia support, to name a few.

The centre will also be able to offer social prescribing – to help members of the community with loneliness, depression, anxiety and housing issues – and we hope to work with The Eden Centre and the leisure centre in these areas.

The new building will allow NHS professionals to collaborate much easier because we will all be under one roof – it’s a great opportunity for NHS professionals to work together – it will also cut down on unnecessary travel between clinics for the patient too.

Hospital

Services or teams based at the hospital, which will be transferring include:

• consultant outpatient clinics: Ear, nose and throat, dermatology, orthopaedics, geriatrics (older people’s clinics) and rheumatology and psychiatry.
• day centre – provided by nurses with links to social care workers, looks at patients’ physical and
• mental health, at the moment this is three-days a week and we hope to increase provision
• therapy services, including physiotherapy, occupational therapy, speech and language therapy
• foot care (podiatry)
• a base for midwives, health visitors, district nurses
• a range of community nursing services linking with the proactive frailty unit for housebound patients and senior nursing care for patients with
• long-term conditions
• a therapy team providing therapy and rehabilitation in patients’ homes
• West Kent Home Treatment Service – a medical team providing assessments and care of people who are at risk of hospital admissions.

We have looked carefully at what services the people of Edenbridge need and would like your thoughts on the plans.

There are rooms in the centre for the community to use. We want to know how you would like to use this space to improve the health and wellbeing of the local community, for example, for yoga, Tai Chi or knitting groups, to parent or art classes, for example.

During the next four weeks, there will be a variety of ways to find out more about additional services that could be added to health and wellbeing centre and give your views on what matters to you most.

We will be attending community groups and if you would like us to come to yours let us know, you can respond via our online service, or take part in one of our face-to-face or digital drop-in sessions.

You will know the MIU at the hospital has not been as reliable as we would like it, due to ongoing staff challenges.

On an average day Edenbridge MIU will see and treat around nine to 15 patients, while the urgent treatment centre (UTC) at Sevenoaks will see 60 to 100 patients.

Therefore, we have looked at how we might deliver urgent care services differently in Edenbridge. Instead of an MIU with x-ray, our emergency nurse practitioners will provide a minor injury and illness service complementing the GP services, from Monday to Friday, 8am until 6pm.

As it stands, NHS Kent and Medway does not support the delivery of an x-ray service as there is not sufficient demand and new diagnostic centres have been established. We need to use every penny of NHS funding in the best possible way and x-ray at Edenbridge is not financially viable. For the past two years, the x-ray at Edenbridge has been closed. For the two years before that, we only saw on average 27 people per month.

However, people living in Edenbridge could use the nearby services at Sevenoaks UTC or the MIU and x-ray service at the Queen Victoria Hospital in East Grinstead.

There are eight NHS x-ray services within 15 miles of Edenbridge. While the number of Edenbridge residents who have access to a car is high, we are working with the local council to look at how public transport or voluntary transport might be improved to these for those people who need it. This will be for planned x-ray appointments only.

Like many NHS trusts across the UK, we are constantly trying to recruit more teams and review the skill mix of our existing staff so we can run safe services.

Unfortunately, given the remote location of Edenbridge, and the high cost of accommodation in the area, we experience significant challenges with attracting qualified nurse practitioners to work in the town. They also need to see a high volume of patients to make sure their clinical skills stay up-to-date.

We have recently recruited a number of internationally-trained nurses to our ward and district teams, some of whom we hope to train as emergency nurse practitioners during the next 12 to 18 months and we also have a staff bank, which we can draw from. Our plan to work more closely with the GPs and a new proactive frailty team will help keep clinicians’ skills up-to-date and make the roles more attractive to recruit to.

We appreciate that unreliability may affect people using it, but usage has always been lower than other MIUs we run, which, for example, will see between 30 to 60 patients a day.

We have been in discussions with NHS Kent and Medway and local GPs and we do not believe it would be financially viable to upgrade the MIU to a UTC when there is another urgent treatment centre in Sevenoaks, which has around 2,000 visits a month and has capacity to see more people.

The opportunities with this new building are great and the project board, and in particular KCHFT’s clinical services director, is discussing with the main hospitals what other clinics and services can be offered at the new building.

There will be rooms available to hire for complimentary therapies and community groups.

There will be NHS dentistry in Edenbridge but it will not be based at the health centre.

The model of care is changing as more people want to be treated in their own homes. KCHFT is a front runner when it comes to outreach care such as its rapid response service and home treatment service. There has never been a greater need for flexibility and the need to look at other solutions to an inpatient stay in hospital including virtual wards; the feedback we receive from patients is they prefer to be treated at home.

Edenbridge Medical Practice will be moving the dispensary to the new building so patients will be able to get their prescription medicine dispensed on site, if they qualify as dispensing patients.

The dispensary is not a pharmacy and will not sell medicines (which don’t need prescription) or other healthcare products.