New Health and Care Centre for Ballymena

The Northern Trust recently attended a meeting of Ballymena Borough Council to present an update on Ballymena Health and Care Centre to its members.

The new £25million health and care centre will improve the provision and delivery of health and social care services to people in Ballymena and throughout the Trust area.

The Trust currently provides primary and community care services from a number of locations across the Ballymena area. The new health and care centre will bring together a range of services in a modern, accessible, one-stop facility. GP services, selected acute outpatient and diagnostic services and a large number of multidisciplinary teams will be available under one roof.

By providing our services in one area in the community closer to where people live they will be able to live independently for longer in their own homes and reduce unnecessary hospitalisation as outlined in the Transforming Your Care report. Local access to health care will help to promote good health, improve chronic disease management and allow for early diagnosis and treatment of conditions.

The new centre will bring together a number of local GP practices and will deliver a range of acute, primary and community care, adult and children’s services. These will include diagnostic and rehabilitation services, such as dental, physiotherapy and X-ray departments. The centre will also provide an out-of-hours Dalriada Urgent Care Service.

The development of health and care centres will drive a change in the services provided. Services such as X-ray will be provided from the new centre which will mean that people living in Ballymena can avail of these services locally rather than travelling to one of the Trusts acute settings and help relieve pressure on our acute facilities.

It is anticipated that the facility will be completed by Spring 2014 and will open by the Autumn of that year; enablement works are on-going and are scheduled to run until late March 2013. During this period access to the Braid Valley site and parking will be restricted.

The contract for the construction of the centre is due to be awarded at the end of February 2013.

We would like to take this opportunity to apologise for any disruption visitors and staff may experience while on the Braid Valley Hospital site, but would ask people to be patient while this essential work is underway. This will be completed late March and access to the Braid Valley and the availability of parking on the site will see a significant improvement on the current arrangements.

28th January 2013