BURY’S Walk-In Centre may have saved the NHS £2.7 million in three years because people went there instead of A&E, new figures reveal.

A Freedom of Information request submitted by an NHS worker and seen by The Bury Times shows the number of people who attended the centre who needed urgent or emergency care and those who said they would have attended A&E without the centre.

According to the NHS, it costs £124 just to be seen at A&E. For an eight month period in 2013/14, 5,717 people said if the centre was not there, they would have gone to A&E, for the year 2014/15 the number is 8,886 and 7,570 for the 2015/16 year. For the years figures are provided, this represents between 14.88 per cent and 22.9 per cent of patients, who would have gone to A&E.

Of the patients who attended, between 0.04 per cent and 0.05 per cent needed emergency or urgent care. It is suggested the centre in Derby Way has saved the NHS in the region of £2.7 million. In January, Bury’s Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) took the decision to close walk-in centres. A consultation was launched, and has since paused on the service’s redesign. The CCG hopes to divert the money to Fairfield A&E, GPs and NHS 111 service.

Labour’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Bury North, James Frith, said: “At a time when the Tories are hammering our NHS with funding cuts, the closure of Bury Walk-In Centre could cost our services an extra £1 million per year.

“The extra pressure on our local GPs and Fairfield A&E would bring services to crisis point. David Nuttall and the Tories, instead of intervening to save our walk-in centre, are supporting its closure.The walk-in centre is a vital service for Bury.” David Nuttall, the Conservative candidate, said: “When the representatives from Bury’s CCG came to see me and explain what they hoped to do they made it clear they were not proposing to close the walk in centre as a money saving exercise but because they thought from a clinical point of view patients would benefit from the money being spent on improving services at GP surgeries and medical centres so people would start to go there rather than need to go a walk in centre or to Accident and Emergency.”

Richard Baum, the Lib Dem candidate said: “It’s a totally false economy to close the centres and NHS managers are forced to make such bad decisions due entirely to Tory government cuts.”

A spokesperson for the CCG said: “The consultation on Bury’s proposed future model for urgent care remains paused as NHS Bury (CCG) awaits the publication of detailed national guidance aimed at improving urgent and emergency care nationally.

“The detailed guidance is expected to be published after June 8.”