Health group urged to listen to better to residents over St Marks

Councillors are keen to get the walk-in at St Mark’s hospital up and running again – given much increased pressure on urgent and emergency health services.

At the council’s Health and Wellbeing Board on Tuesday, Frimley Health and Care (part of the group that runs Wexham Park Hospital) gave an update on how the figures are looking for emergency care.

Stephen Dunn, system director of delivery, said there has been a five per cent year on year increase in demand. Compared to last month, there has been an extra 50 patients per day at Wexham Park.

He said Frimley was working on improving access to urgent and emergency services and targeting these deprived populations, partly at looking at ways to use money differently.

The Slough population are the ‘primary users’ due to its deprived population – which makes people twice as likely to attend A&E or be admitted to hospital.

But leader of the council Simon Werner wanted to stress the impact on people in Maidenhead too.

“Everyone sees Maidenhead as rich but there are real pockets of deprivation," he said. “It’s deprived pockets in richer areas that actually suffer more than anyone.”

Mr Dunn agreed that this was important and said that Frimley recognised this in its work.

In addition to emergency services, there has been a five per cent year on year increase in use of primary care services, which includes GPs other services that are the ‘front door’ of the NHS.

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In April 2020, St Mark’s minor injury and illness walk-in centre temporarily closed and has not reopened since.

In February this year, Frimley said that those requiring same-day urgent care for injuries could now be seen at St Mark’s with a referral.

Speaking at the meeting on Tuesday, Cllr Catherine del Campo, cabinet member for adults, health and housing services, raised the issue of St Marks.

“We very much want to help people move away from A&E but they are struggling to get GP appointments,” she said. “Politically, we’d really like to get our walk-in urgent care centre reopened.”

Mr Dunn said this was something Frimley was listening to residents about – but this is ‘in the context of a very challenging financial and service delivery environment at the moment.’

He moved on to highlight ways in which Frimley is bolstering its urgent and emergency care support, focused particularly on supporting people in the community, so they do not have to stay in hospital, or return there unnecessarily.

Joanna Dixon, Healthwatch volunteer lead for East Berkshire (an organisation which ‘champion[s] for people who use health and social care services), said:

“If we were going to look into [St Mark’s] as a project we'd need to be receiving feedback that that was an issue for local people and at the moment we're not hearing that.”

But Cllr Werner replied to say that the reason for this was because when they did so before, they felt the response from Healthwatch was ‘dismissive’ of their worries.

“They didn't feel Healthwatch was going to stand up for them – they were just passing on information from the higher-ups,” he said.

He suggested looking again at the way Healthwatch respond when receiving these requests so that members of the public feel they're being heard.

Ms Dixon said she would discuss this with other members of the Healthwatch team.