Filed 10 August 2026

One Health Centre? What Happened to Choice?

Right, so apparently we’re getting a brand new health centre. One. Singular. And that’s progress, they say. Off Milestone Way, they reckon, replacing the three separate places I’ve never actually managed to get an appointment at anyway.

Now call me old-fashioned, but I liked having three different places to be told no by. Salters Meadow said no on Mondays, the temporary one at the Leisure Centre said no on Wednesdays, and Darwin’s Chasetown lot said no with a bit more paperwork. Variety, that’s what that was. Choice. And now some lot at County Hall, or the NHS, or one of them Integrated whatsit Boards nobody voted for, want to squash it all into one building and call it “coordinated care.” I call it putting all your eggs in one basket, and then moving the basket further from my actual house.

And it’s not as if this is some idea being rushed through, either. They’ve been talking about doing something like this for years, by all accounts, and getting precisely nowhere with it. Which, if you ask me, tells its own story. If somebody sensible had wanted this built, it’d have been built by now. The fact it’s taken this long tells me that somewhere along the way, somebody looked at it properly and thought better of it, and now they’re just too far in to admit it and are ploughing on regardless. Which is a very good reason, in my opinion, to leave well alone.

A chap I know reckons buildings on that site have always attracted “young people” like skateboarders and kickabouts. That’s good enough for me; he wouldn’t say a thing like that if it wasn’t true. I’m all for “youth provision” as I think they call it now, but not where it disturbs normal people just trying to go through their day. Stands to reason you don’t put a health centre in that kind of location.

Somebody’s put a proper write-up together about it and stuck it through all the doors on our estate. A flash-looking leaflet with some smug-looking gentleman on the front. I put it straight into the recycling, because Doris moans at me if I put it in the normal bin. Nobody’s got time of an evening to do that. Some Mother’s Do ‘Ave ‘Em was on the telly. But you could tell whoever did it had put some real effort in. Bit of a shame more people round here can’t be bothered to put that sort of care into anything.

Not that I’ll be using it much, mind, what with the private healthcare I pay for meaning I can see a proper doctor in Birmingham within the week if I ever needed to, which I won’t, being fighting fit. But it’s the principle. Some of us remember when a man could get ignored by his GP within walking distance, and now they want to make it easier for everyone else instead.