Saxmundham's One Stop Shop

Bringing Better Health Care Closer to Home

For over 20 years, Dr John Havard and the team at Saxmundham Health have been building a vision for genuinely community-centred healthcare in rural East Suffolk. That vision - a 'one stop shop' bringing primary care, diagnostics, dentistry, mental health support, childcare, family support and community health services under one roof - is not just an aspiration. It is an oven-ready solution, waiting to be delivered.

The Government has committed to delivering 250 new Neighbourhood Health Centres across England, with the explicit aim of bringing care closer to communities. This commitment has generated genuine hope in rural areas like Suffolk Coastal, which have for too long been expected to travel to urban centres for care that should be on their doorstep. NHS Norfolk and Suffolk ICB are now developing its plans but in a letter to me on 1 June 2026, the nine locations identified for early development do not include a single site in rural East Suffolk.

This campaign calls on the ICB to add Saxmundham to its Neighbourhood Health Hub plans. Saxmundham serves a wide rural catchment across East and Mid Suffolk — an area where Ipswich Hospital is over an hour away in one direction and James Paget Hospital in Gorleston is over an hour in the other, where public transport is limited, and health inequalities are real.

Why it matters:

1. An oven-ready solution

The Saxmundham one stop shop is not a pipe dream. It is ready to go. Dr Havard has championed this for over 20 years, and since I have been elected, I have been championing this with Ministers and the Department for Health and Social Care. An architect has been commissioned and initial plans are drawn. What is needed now is the Neighbourhood Health Hub designation and the capital investment to deliver the One Stop Shop and the wider community health services alongside it.

2. Bringing care into the community

The principle of Neighbourhood Health Hubs is to move care out of hospitals and into communities — especially for people facing real barriers travelling to distant services. For Saxmundham and the villages of East and Mid Suffolk, those barriers are stark: no direct rail links, infrequent buses, and journeys of over an hour to Ipswich or Great Yarmouth. The one stop shop would bring primary care, diagnostics, dental services, mental health support, childcare, family support and community health services together on a single site, serving not just Saxmundham but a wide rural catchment of East and Mid Suffolk offering good accessibility for all.

3. Rural areas are being left behind

Of the nine NHC locations named by NHS Norfolk and Suffolk ICB in June 2026, not one is in rural East Suffolk. All are in large towns or urban areas. This is exactly the pattern that the Labour Rural Research Group, chaired and founded by me, warned against in our report on Rural Poverty in Britain. The recommendation was clear: rural areas must be prioritised in the rollout of the Neighbourhood Health Service.

Saxmundham is the opportunity to deliver on that commitment.