4. Health: GP, Dental, and Community Services

Lakeside Healthcare's Corby practice — split between sites at Cottingham Road and Forest Gate — is the dominant GP provider in the town, with around 47,000 to 48,000 registered patients. The wider Lakeside Healthcare Group serves around 170,000 patients across Northamptonshire, Cambridgeshire, Lincolnshire, and Peterborough. Concentration on this scale brings advantages but also creates real risks if a single provider underperforms.

On dental access, the picture is bleaker. Across England, only 40.3% of adults had seen an NHS dentist in the past 24 months by March 2024. Around 48% of dental practices nationally with declared capacity are not accepting new adult NHS patients. Northamptonshire has secured 4 places under NHS England's Golden Hello dental recruitment incentive, 2 of which are currently live.

For hospital care, Corby depends on Kettering General Hospital, seven miles away. Kettering General serves the whole of North Northamptonshire and parts of Rutland and Leicestershire from a constrained site with ageing buildings, and it is consistently under pressure. Every Corby resident who travels to Kettering for an outpatient appointment, a scan, a routine antenatal check or a low-risk birth adds to that pressure. Much of that care does not need a district general hospital. It needs good local facilities — and Corby already has the site for them.

4.1 Targets

4.2 Willowbrook: Corby's health campus, expanded

The Willowbrook Health Complex on Cottingham Road is already the centre of Corby's health provision. It brings together Willowbrook Health Centre and Corby Community Hospital, run by Northamptonshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust; Lakeside Healthcare's main surgery; Corby Urgent Care Centre, open every day and treating the minor injuries and illnesses that would otherwise go to Kettering; dental, pharmacy and physiotherapy services; and, most recently, the Corby Community Diagnostic Centre, an £8 million Government-funded facility run by Kettering General Hospital, with CT, MRI and ultrasound scanning, operating twelve hours a day, seven days a week, and designed to add around 80,000 tests a year locally.

That is a real asset, and it points the way. The diagnostic centre shows that hospital-grade services can be delivered on the Willowbrook site, closer to patients, at a fraction of the cost of new hospital building, while relieving Kettering General. Our proposal is to keep going: to grow Willowbrook, step by step, into a health campus that provides as much of Corby's planned, routine and lower-risk care as can safely be delivered outside a hospital.

We propose that the ICB, Kettering General Hospital and Northamptonshire Healthcare jointly plan and fund the following expansion of Willowbrook:

• A midwife-led maternity unit. Corby is one of the youngest towns in the East Midlands and has long had one of the higher birth rates in England, yet every Corby birth takes place in Kettering or beyond. A midwife-led unit at Willowbrook would offer antenatal and postnatal care and low-risk births in Corby, with agreed transfer arrangements to Kettering General's consultant-led unit where needed. Such units are standard NHS provision alongside district hospitals and are well suited to a town of Corby's size and age profile.
• Consultant-led outpatient clinics delivered in Corby rather than Kettering — starting with the specialties with the highest Corby demand, such as maternity, paediatrics, orthopaedics, dermatology, ophthalmology and diabetes — using the outreach model that hospital trusts already run in community hospitals elsewhere.
• Day-case and minor procedures — endoscopy, minor surgery, injections and infusions — in a dedicated day unit, taking predictable, lower-risk activity off the Kettering site and freeing its theatres and beds for the work that only a hospital can do.
• Corby Urgent Care Centre protected and extended: longer opening hours, X-ray available for the full opening period, and a guarantee that it is retained and resourced as the town grows, so that Corby residents with a minor injury have no reason to travel to Kettering's emergency department.
• Community rehabilitation and step-down beds at Corby Community Hospital, so that Corby patients who no longer need an acute bed can recover closer to home and Kettering can discharge sooner.
• Mental health and children's services on site: a mental health drop-in and crisis café, health visiting, and children's therapy clinics, co-located with the existing services.
• The land and access to do it. Willowbrook still has undeveloped land, as the diagnostic centre showed. The site needs a masterplan, additional parking, a proper bus stop, and a safe walking and cycling link to the town centre and station so that a campus serving the whole town can be reached without a car.

We are deliberate about what we are not asking for. We are not proposing an accident and emergency department, and we are not proposing that Willowbrook become a hospital. Emergency and complex care need the critical mass of a district general hospital, and Corby's interest is in Kettering General being a strong one. The case for Willowbrook is the opposite: move the care that does not need a hospital out of one, and Kettering General is left with more room for the care that does.

4.3 East Corby Health: earmarking the beginnings

Priors Hall and Weldon Park together will bring more than 6,000 homes, and with Weldon village, Little Stanion, and Stanion in the eastern side of the Growth Area is already home to a population the size of a small town, much of it a long way from a GP surgery. Land has been reserved in the Priors Hall Zone 1 district centre for a health facility to serve the development. It has not been built.

We propose that this land, or a better site near Weldon if one is available, is formally earmarked as East Corby Health: not a second Willowbrook, and not a promise of a building in every phase, but the beginnings of medical provision in the east of the town, designed from the start to grow.

• Phase one: a GP-led health centre with a branch surgery, practice nurses, pharmacy, phlebotomy and a small number of visiting clinics — the services a growing residential area needs first.
• Designed for expansion: the site, the planning permission and the building should allow additional clinical space to be added as the population grows, so that dental, community nursing, mental health and outpatient sessions can follow without starting again.
• Funded by growth: Section 106 and Community Infrastructure Levy contributions from Priors Hall, Weldon Park and the eastern logistics developments to be identified for it, alongside ICB and NHS capital, on the principle that the development generating the demand should contribute to meeting it.
• Complementary, not competing: East Corby Health handles primary and community care in the east; Willowbrook is the town's campus for everything above that.

4.4 NHS dentistry

• Two new NHS dental contracts ring-fenced for new and unregistered patients, with a delivery floor of 12,000 NHS courses of treatment per year between them.
• A children's dental access guarantee delivered through schools and health visitors, building on Healthwatch Northamptonshire's existing oral health work.
• Dental therapist training placements at Willowbrook and, in time, East Corby Health.
• Active recruitment using the existing NHS England Golden Hello scheme.

4.5 What Corby will press for

• The ICB and Kettering General Hospital to publish a Corby services plan: which outpatient, diagnostic, maternity and day-case services will move to Willowbrook, on what timetable, and how much Kettering activity that represents.
• A clinical case and business case for a midwife-led maternity unit at Willowbrook, commissioned within the first phase of this plan.
• Formal earmarking of the East Corby Health site in the new North Northamptonshire Local Plan and in the Priors Hall reserved matters approvals, with a first-phase opening date.
• Community engagement on the design of both sites, neighbourhood by neighbourhood — with particular attention to residents in the Lloyds and Kingswood wards for Willowbrook, and to Priors Hall, Weldon and Little Stanion for East Corby Health.
• A Corby Health Watch panel run jointly with Healthwatch Northamptonshire, reporting through the Infrastructure Watch report.
• Volunteer befriending and transport-to-appointments support, so that older and disabled residents can reach Willowbrook, East Corby Health and, where necessary, Kettering.

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