£10m care home will help patients not fit to go home
A 75-bed ‘halfway house’ for patients leaving hospital is set to be built at Kent Medical Campus.
Plans for the £10m care home – which will provide facilities for people leaving hospital but not well enough to return home – were given the green light by Maidstone Borough Council last week.
The centre will provide roundthe-clock care for the frail and elderly, providing a mix of rehabilitation, respite and dementia care.
It will be built at the campus, which is next to Newnham Court Shopping Village, Bearsted Road, near junction 7 of the M20, and will create more than 100 fulltime jobs when it opens, though a date has not yet been set.
An operator for the facility is yet to be announced and it is not known whether the NHS will commission any of the beds.
Gary Watson, director at JLL, the company advising Kent Medical Campus on property matters, said: “The development of a £10m new step-down facility and care home will help those patients in need of further support after a stay in hospital. It offers the potential to reduce delayed discharges back into the community, making it possible to treat more patients.
“The combination of KIMS Hospital, the county’s largest independent hospital, the Cygnet Health Care facility and this new step-down development, means that Kent Medical Campus is delivering on its ambition to be a centre for health to support Maidstone and the county as a whole.”
The decision comes as Gidds Pond Way was officially opened by mayor of Maidstone Cllr Malcolm Greer.
The £1.5m access route will connect Newnham Court Road with the £18m Cygnet Health Care development currently under construction. The facility will provide 65 private mental healthcare places.
Kent Medical Campus already has permission to create 98,000m2 of floor space at the site – equating to 14 football pitches.