Health minister Stephen Kinnock said the Wakefield centre was “changing how people access care”.<\/p>\n
“This is healthcare built around people’s lives,” he said.<\/p>\n
“It is cutting hospital trips while boosting footfall and helping local shops.”<\/p>\n
In Barnsley, a health centre is planned for the first floor of the Alhambra Shopping Centre.<\/p>\n
The former Wilko store will host hospital eye specialists and other outpatient services. It is expected to be fully staffed by 2028.<\/p>\n
It follows the opening of a community diagnostic centre in The Glass Works shopping centre in 2022 in the town, which has seen hundreds of thousands of people attend appointments for things like blood tests, ultrasounds and X-rays.<\/p>\n
It is estimated that well over 100,000 visits a year could also be made to the new Alhambra centre instead of the hospital.<\/p>\n
Leader of Barnsley Council, Sir Steve Houghton, said the initiative was “revolutionising how residents access health and wellbeing services”.<\/p>\n
He said the health centre would “reduce pressure on existing healthcare facilities, improve access and quality of care and attract even more visitors to Barnsley town centre”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Health minister Stephen Kinnock said the Wakefield centre was “changing how people access care”. “This is healthcare built…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":145985,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[103,397,396,61,60],"class_list":{"0":"post-145984","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-healthcare","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=145984"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/145984\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145985"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=145984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=145984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=145984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}