New health centre plans to include dental service

12:20pm Monday 13th October 2008

Comments (1)   Have your say »

A PLANNED new health centre for Basingstoke is set to have a pioneering dental service where patients can just drop in with the minimum of fuss.

Hampshire Primary Care Trust has revealed the first details of what it wants in the health centre, including 20,000 booked and drop-in “units of treatment” per year of dentistry.

At a briefing for borough councillors, Julia Bagshaw, head of primary care commissioning at the trust, said: “We don’t think this has been tried anywhere yet.”

The health chief said the trust is in the middle of tendering for a group to run the proposed health centre. As previously reported in The Gazette, many local GPs have joined forces to bid to run the service.

She said the trust wants a GP minor injury unit and nurse-led minor ailment service to give people an alternative to visiting Basingstoke hospital’s accident and emergency unit.

She said: “If people can’t get an appointment with their GP, they pitch up at A and E.”

The trust also wants a nurse-led surgery, with access to a GP, that could accommodate 50,000 patient visits per year and a registered GP for up to 3,000 patients over the first five years.

Minor surgery, quitters services, contraceptive and sexual health services and a cardiovascular risk and case-finding unit are the other services the trust would like the successful bidder for the surgery to offer.

When councillors sought assurances the new surgery would not affect existing services, Mrs Bagshaw said: “I have absolutely no intention and no mechanism to reduce the funding of any existing general medical practice.

“The only way they would receive less funding is if their patients decided to go elsewhere. This is additional funding for additional services.”

She said the bidders are being asked to locate the surgery in an easily-accessible location in the centre of Basingstoke. It would be open to registered and non-registered patients seven days a week, between 8am and 8pm.

A winning tender will be selected in November and a contract signed in December with a view to the service starting in April 2009.