A NEW health hub providing essential health checks and clinics for patients has opened in Andover town centre.

Andover Health Hub and Vaccination Centre opened at the old Vaccination Clinic in the Chantry Centre on Monday, January 9.

Run by Andover Primary Care Network (PCN) with support from Test Valley Borough Council, the Andover Health Hub will be seeing patients for NHS health checks, BP checks, Covid vaccinations, smoking cessation clinics, shape-up for life clinics, music therapy group and chronic pain peer support group among many other services.

It is a free service and residents can see the staff by booking an appointment.

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It is not an urgent care centre and there won’t be any doctors at the hub. There will be care co-ordinators and health care assistants from PCN and Andover Mind which provides services for patients.

The hub is also offering NHS health checks to anyone aged between 40 and 74 years old with no pre-existing conditions, particularly if they have not received a health check during the pandemic. The health checks have been designed to spot early signs of kidney disease, stroke, type two diabetes, dementia and heart disease.

The hub will be open from 9am to 5pm on Mondays to Fridays.

The vaccination centre at the unit closed just before Christmas, and since then TVBC and colleagues from Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board and Andover PCN have worked together to upgrade the space, with the PCN funding new flooring and furniture and temporary partitions to transform the unit and provide the new services.

Andover PCN is a collaborative project involving five GP surgeries in Andover.

The health hub was officially opened by Andover PCN’s strategic clinical director Dr Sarah Sierens.

Borough council leader Cllr Phil North and Cllr Iris Andersen also attended the event.

Dr Sierens said: “The health hub is about three aspects of care. It is about supporting with preventative medicine and education. We are going to run courses for helping people learn about the best food to eat if they have type 2 diabetes, run pain workshops, anger management courses etc.

“It’s also about drawing social medicines out of GPs and freeing up some space for them to deal with other problems.

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“It’s also about patients being able to come forward and interact with us so that we can understand what are those niche needs in Andover, because it is quite a unique community with unique needs.

“What it is definitely not about is undermining the current system in there. We really want to collaborate with charities and other groups that work within Andover to support patients with health and social needs.”

NHS and local authority bosses have said that this is just the first step towards creating a fully functioning health hub that will provide a much wider range of services, and will be part-funded using money TVBC has secured from the government’s UK Shared Prosperity Fund (UKSPF).

A sum of £280K from the UKSPF will help to expand the hub over the coming years and this will be complemented by an additional £100K contribution towards the creation of NHS outreach worker posts.

Leader of Test Valley Borough Council, Councillor Phil North, added: “This is a great example of partnership working and we are delighted to be supporting our NHS colleagues to pilot and deliver this much-needed local health hub.

“This is very much the first step towards delivering on our ambition to create a proper health hub in the town, which we hope will eventually reduce the number of people having to access the NHS for treatments for problems that, with the right support and information, could have been avoided. Thanks to the UKSPF, we are in a great position to take this work forward. And with the knowledge our NHS colleagues will gain from this pilot, we will be better placed to understand and shape our long-term plans for health services in the town centre, so we can deliver them as part of the masterplan.”

Health hub care co-ordinator Vikki Jolley said: “We will do checks for patients and then escalate to their own GP surgeries if anything needed to be looked at further. It’s all about helping people get the right advice and go to the right places. We really want to help the community.”