Bid to bulldoze nursing home to make way for modern replacement
PLANS TO BUILD A MODERN CARE FACILITY IN ITS PLACE
PLANS have been submitted to demolish a Derbyshire nursing home and build a replacement.
The application, submitted by Ashfields Care Ltd, would see the former Kidsley Grange Nursing Home, in Heanor Road, Smalley, demolished.
Struggling finances at the former facility, run by Ashmere, forced its closure, it is understood, in June last year.
A new modern building would be constructed in its place, with what the applicant claims would be a more sympathetic design and up to current standards of care and support.
Amber Valley Borough Council will make a decision on the application in the next few months.
Ashfields Care Ltd also operates Ashfield Care Home in Heanor, a few miles away, and says it would allow for efficiency of management and staff to operate the two close together and under the same company – with both providing specialist care for people with dementia.
A statement on behalf of the firm alongside the application details: “The proposed nursing home has been designed specifically with dementia sufferers in mind, and will allow the specific needs of dementia sufferers to be met.
These include improved security to, on the one hand, ensure that patients cannot leave the facility of their own volition, but on the other hand, will allow these residents to wander freely at will throughout the home and the carefully designed and managed external secure garden courtyard.
“Extra wide corridors and circulation areas to allow for patients to ‘roam’ but in a safe environment as the access will be controlled at key points.
“Dementia patients especially, because of their condition, benefit from being able to walk around freely, but safely and with supervision.”
The application says the new home would have 36 single bedrooms, all of which would have en-suite bathrooms specially designed for people with dementia. This is 15 more than the current 21-room facility.
It says that the home would also have a hair salon, therapy treatment areas and a number of seating and lounge rooms, as well as an outdoor courtyard with several trees and planting – along with 13 car parking spaces.
The three-storey complex would mimic the curve of Heanor Road, instead of the current zig-zag shape of the existing building – described as “discordant and fragmented, with a number of disparate features”.
Due to the steep slope on the site, the report says the building would appear to be two-storey from the roadside.
“This holistic redevelopment of the site will present a much more sensitive response to the street scene, the massing reducing in scale at either end to help blend in with the neighbouring and opposite properties,” the report details.
The existing care facility covers 897 square metres, while the new one would be almost double the size at 1,576 square metres. A total of 24 full-time and 24 part-time jobs would be created as a result of the scheme, the applicant says.
When the site was put up for sale in November, a spokesperson for Ashmere said: “We closed in June after a long consultation with residents, their families and the staff there. It was a small 21-bed home that had been impacted by Covid. Most of the residents and staff stayed within the Ashmere group of homes.”
The proposed nursing home has been designed specifically with dementia sufferers in mind Statement