This morning we attended the official opening of CHD Living’s Bagshot Park neuro-rehabilitation centre and its Ascot Rehabilitation centre. The centre was opened by Esther McVey MP, Minister for Disabled People.
Camberley People covered the opening HERE, and have neatly described the centre,
“The 41-room centre, which is run by CHD Living and has its own team of specialist therapists, two gyms and a hydropool, and has been operating on the London Road in Bagshot since November.
Today’s tour marked the launch of a new partnership between Bagshot Park neuro-rehabilitation centre, which takes referrals from the NHS, with Ascot Rehabilitation, an international consultant-led service which is privately run.”
We also toured the centre and were immensely impressed with the facilities and staff. It’s the spaciousness and quality feel to the centre that is a lasting impression, as is the focus on rehabilitation. Here are my photo’s of our visit.
Dear Tim
Your piece on the opening of Bagshot Park, owned by CHD Living fails to highlight the profound adverse effects such developments have on existing local residents. The NHS funding available in Surrey Heath is fixed, in fact will fall slightly this year. Patients in such facilities require far more NHS input than average patients. This generates an extra burden on the budget. As the budget is not adjusted when these homes are built there is less money to spend on other residents / patients. This means drug budgets, GP availability, out of hours services and referral to hospital budgets are all reduced for those who already live in Bagshot and Surrey Heath as a whole.
We do need such facilities and we do need nursing homes, but when such facilities are planned they are only planned by property developers looking for appropriate plots of land. There is never any input from social services or the NHS. This results in new care facilities being built where land is available rather than where the patient need is. In the last 3 years Sunrise Senior Living and Bagshot Park have opened in Bagshot and a new home is being constructed on Lightwater Road. These combined developments will provide an additional 180 beds in an area when most nursing homes are struggling to fill their existing beds. Most people filling those beds will therefore come from outside the borough so contribute to a net drain on resources for those of us that already live here.
As the only control on the provision of nursing and care homes is the planning system you might have expected the local authority to act. The borough council to my knowledge has not acted. One possibility would be to levy section 106 charges so that the developers might pay something towards the local health economy they are destabilising. I have not been able to find any evidence of this happening at any of the three highlighted recent developments.
Don’t be fooled by the plush surroundings and facilities at Bagshot Park. Local residents are the loosing out because of it.
Adrian Davis
Lightwater Surgery
By: Adrian Davis on September 20, 2012
at 9:08 am