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A walk-in centre providing non-appointment treatment for thousands of patients in north Kent will close next week in a major reshuffle of urgent care services.
The White Horse Walk-In facility in Northfleet is set to shut on Tuesday after health bosses decided to create two new urgent treatment centres (UTC) in Dartford and Gravesend.
The centre, at the Springhead Surgery site in Vale Road, will still be used by the NHS but walk-in services will move to Gravesend Community Hospital in one of two new UTCs to treat "minor illness and minor injuries".
The second will be located at Darent Valley Hospital and work in partnership with the accident and emergency department at the hospital to provide "additional critical care".
Both will provide the walk-in and minor injury services previously provided at White Horse Walk-In.
GP services at the Springhead Surgery – formed when the former White Horse Surgery merged with the Gateway Medical Practice and Forge Surgery last year – are unaffected.
The UTCs at Gravesend hospital and Darent Valley are due to open later this year and patients requiring urgent appointments or treatment from July 1 can call their regular GP or NHS 111.
NHS documents reveal there are plans to move "some outpatient clinics" from Darent Valley Hospital to the White Horse walk-in centre following an urgent care review last year.
It is also understood primary care and GP services will move into the former walk-in centre building to help expand facilities.
The move proposed by the NHS – agreed by the former Dartford, Gravesham and Swanley Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) in January – is expected to cost £85 million over the next five years, which is £1m more than the arrangement using the walk-in centre.
In a statement to patients issued yesterday on Facebook, the White Horse Walk-In Centre said many staff previously based there would find "parallel roles in the UTC".
It added: "We would like to thank the exceptional staff, medical, nursing and administrative, who have provided a service second to none for over 10 years.
"The Covid-19 crisis has overshadowed our last months, and there will be no final party of the sort that White Horse Surgery Walk-In Centre occasionally threw in celebration of notable NHS events.
"But the lessons learned about telephone and video call triage that we have had to apply will be useful in the new UTC and revamped 111, so the three hour queues may be a thing of the past.
"We would like to thank all the many people who have used our services, and for the many compliments that we have received.
"This is not goodbye, just a change of form, and we hope that the public will be as happy with the new, as they were with the old."
The future use of the White Horse centre will now be administered by the new Kent and Medway CCG – a merger of all the county's CCGs which came into force in April.
The changes, which were first discussed in 2017 and formally proposed in April 2019, follow a four-month consultation with the public which the NHS said almost 16,500 people responded to.
GP and Clinical Chair of the Kent and Medway CCG, Dr Navin Kumta, said: “We are taking the next steps in the exciting journey to create linked urgent treatment centres for patients in Dartford, Gravesham and Swanley across both sites, as decided earlier this year. I would like to reassure the public that they will still be able to see a GP urgently if they need to.
“We have been working hard to improve access to GP appointments for the past two years. Practices should be able to offer on the day appointments to patients who clinically need them. There is a triage system in place to help identify those patients who need to be seen on the same day. Most patients will be able to be seen by their own practice but some may be asked to visit another local surgery for their appointment.”
The NHS says the demand for services at the walk-in centre has reduced since lockdown in March.
Responding to the pandemic has also caused a slight delay to the planned opening date for the UTCs but health bosses insist they will open in the coming months.
