Department of Health Minister Norman Lamb met with Chippenham’s MP today to discuss plans for the town’s hospital but was not allowed inside.

Mr Lamb, Minister of State for Care and Support, came to offer his support for doctors’ ambitions of having a 24-7 urgent care centre based at Chippenham Hospital.

But he had to discuss the matter with MP Duncan Hames outside the hospital in the bitter cold after Great Western Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust declined the Lib Dems’ request to meet inside the building.

The Trust said it was not able to comment on the reasons for its decision at this time.

Mr Lamb and Mr Hames also met with Dr Nick Brown, who practises at Rowden Medical Partnership. He told them Chippenham needed an urgent care centre to meet the demands of its growing population.

Dr Brown said: “If they’re building 5,000 houses in Chippenham, where is the funding coming from for healthcare? That’s a 25 per cent increase in size. Two of Chippenham’s surgeries are currently at full capacity and the other would have to develop its building.

“We have demanded to meet with NHS England to ask them, and we are meeting at the end of this month.

“If we were starting all over again on a blank page, we wouldn’t have these little places dotted around. Are we going to further fragment by building another surgery elsewhere, or are we going to have primary care, secondary care, social services, mental health and district nurse services all together in one centre?”

His vision, shared by other surgeries in town, is for an urgent care centre open 24-7 based at the community hospital.

“There is out of hours urgent care at the moment, but in different places,” he said. “My vision is that it’s all one unit – whether it’s a fracture or a chest infection, everybody comes to the same place. So firstly, the patient knows where they’re supposed to go, they don’t have to make a choice. And secondly, you end up with a bigger organisation that can do more.”

He said he was very disappointed they had not got any feedback from NHS England on their unsuccessful bid for funding for an urgent care centre last year.

Mr Lamb, the care and support minister, told Dr Brown: “I will work with Duncan to make the case here. I am an advocate of joined up care.”

Duncan Hames said he was delighted health minister Jeremy Hunt had agreed to take another look at the idea.

He said in Parliament on January 13: “The three GP surgeries in Chippenham were turned down by the Prime Minister’s challenge fund, despite developing imaginative plans to bring together all the town’s acute GP care at a new urgent care centre at Chippenham community hospital. They received no feedback, even from NHS England. Will the Secretary of State be more flexible when receiving further proposals from the doctors, who are, after all, very busy looking after their patients?”

Mr Hunt, who visited Rowden Medical Partnership in April last year, replied: “I have met the doctors in Chippenham and been personally lobbied on that plan. I thought it sounded very promising, so I am happy to take it away and look at it again, and hopefully at some stage they can get some of the funding.”