NHS and government respond to calls for St Mark's Walk-in Centre reopening

A reopening of St Mark’s Hospital walk-in centre in Maidenhead looks off the table for the time being after the town's new MP called for a meeting with government. 

The minor injuries walk-in centre shut its doors in 2020 but has faced calls for it to be reopened, including from Maidenhead MP Josh Reynolds.

But Labour’s new-look Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) would not be drawn on comments on the centre’s future.

And the NHS trust delivering healthcare at St Mark’s said its Urgent Primary Care Service – opened in 2023 - offers residents ‘more comprehensive’ options.  

In a statement, a spokesperson for NHS Frimley Health and Care Integrated Care System (ICS) said:

“At NHS Frimley we are committed to providing safe, effective, high quality and cost-effective services both for and on behalf of our residents.

“The Urgent Primary Care Service currently delivered at St Mark’s Hospital in Maidenhead meets these requirements in a more comprehensive way than the former walk-in service was able to.

They added St Mark’s walk-in service offered 370 appointments a week but – on average – less than half of these were used.

By contast, the urgent care service offered an average of more than 605 per week in the first two weeks of this month – with more than 95 per cent used by residents.

Further benefits of the system include same day appointments when booked through a GP and a wider range of healthcare professionals available at the centre.

The spokesperson did advise however, that NHS Frimley had invited MPs for meetings to discuss ‘matters of common interest’.

Mr Reynolds has written to Wes Streeting, Labour’s secretary of state for health and social care, to ask for a meeting to discuss the St Mark’s Centre.

Speaking to the Advertiser, he said: “The reason you have waits at Wexham of 15 hours is because people from Maidenhead can’t access the support and the care they need, when they need it.

“It’s about opening downstream services, so the problems don’t get further along the line.”

He added: “I think it's the case that we just need to stop kicking the can down the road and I think that there’s obviously a reluctance to get it open and there has been a reluctance in the past to open the walk-in centre.

“Whether that reluctance is sat with the Government, whether that reluctance is sat with the health service and the Trust, I don’t know.

“But whatever we need to do to get that blockage, unblocked, is what we’ve got to do in order to get the walk-in open.”

When approached directly for comment on reopening the walk-in centre, a Department of Health and Social care spokesperson responded:

“The NHS is broken. It is the mission of this government to fix it and get patients treated on time again.

 “We will cut waiting lists by delivering an extra 40,000 operations, scans, and appointments each week to help patients access the care they so desperately need.”