A council review of emergency care wants Wycombe's urgent treatment centre open until 10pm in a pilot. None of its 11 recommendations asks for a full A&E.
The urgent treatment centre at Wycombe Hospital should stay open until 10pm in a trial, a review by Buckinghamshire councillors says. It closes at 8pm today. The review does not ask for a full A&E department to come back to the town.
The report goes to Buckinghamshire Council’s Cabinet on Tuesday 10 November. Cabinet and the NHS bodies named in it are due to give their answers at that meeting.
What the review found
The council asked its Health and Adult Social Care Select Committee to look at emergency care in November 2025, after a motion at Full Council. Six councillors formed a review group. They held four days of evidence sessions in March and April 2026 and visited the urgent treatment centre at Wycombe Hospital and the emergency department at Stoke Mandeville. The review report was agreed by the committee on 1 October.
On Wycombe, it records:
- the urgent treatment centre sees about 100 patients a day, and most are treated there without being sent on to hospital
- it is open 8am to 8pm, seven days a week, and is run by FedBucks, the county’s GP federation, with a GP and advanced practitioners
- Wycombe Hospital still takes stroke and cardiac emergencies, while major trauma goes to the John Radcliffe in Oxford
- Stoke Mandeville in Aylesbury is the only full A&E in the county
The report sets out why Wycombe’s A&E went. In the late 1990s each town had a small department with two consultants. Stoke Mandeville now has a team of 14. The councillors say they heard that clinical and patient safety drove the decision, and that keeping the specialist teams behind an emergency department running on both sites “was not viable”.
The 10pm pilot
Recommendation 3 is the one that touches Wycombe directly. It reads:
That FedBucks, with the support of the relevant commissioner, undertakes a pilot to extend the opening hours at the Wycombe Urgent Treatment Centre to 10pm to help manage demand across the system.
The pilot would be judged on how many people used the extra two hours and how ill they were. The report gives no start date and no cost. The commissioner is now the Thames Valley Integrated Care Board, which took over Buckinghamshire from 1 April 2026.
The other recommendations
There are 11 recommendations in all. Most are aimed at keeping people away from emergency departments in the first place. They include:
- extra funding for GP surgeries in the most deprived areas, which the Thames Valley ICB has promised, delivered “as a matter of urgency”
- better links between GPs and pharmacies, and wider promotion of Pharmacy First
- a shared patient record across health, social care and the voluntary sector
- a single public campaign on where to go for urgent care, with a printed card along the lines of “Think 111”
The report also gives a measure of the pressure on GPs. In December 2025, Buckinghamshire practices took 256,445 phone calls. It says High Wycombe practices received more calls per patient than any other part of the county.
Wycombe Hospital since 2005
The report’s own history of the site:
- 2005: the full A&E closes, and serious emergency and trauma surgery move to Stoke Mandeville
- 2007: Wycombe’s department becomes an Emergency Medical Centre
- 2012: it is cut to a 24-hour Minor Injuries and Illness Unit, largely nurse-led
- 2017 to 2019: it becomes an Urgent Treatment Centre under a national programme, with GPs, X-ray and links to NHS 111
The hospital itself is being rebuilt. The trust’s plans for a new six-storey building are set out in our story on the extra £25m.
What it means for you
Nothing changes yet. The urgent treatment centre at Wycombe Hospital is open 8am to 8pm every day for injuries and illnesses that are urgent but not life-threatening. That covers sprains, suspected minor fractures, cuts, minor head injuries and infections.
For anything life-threatening, call 999. Outside those hours, NHS 111 can book you in or send you to the out-of-hours GP service, which runs from 6.30pm to 8am on weekdays and 24 hours a day at weekends and on bank holidays.
If the pilot goes ahead, Wycombe would have two more hours each evening of walk-in urgent care before the choice narrows to NHS 111, the out-of-hours GP service or an emergency department such as Stoke Mandeville in Aylesbury.
The council has said its Health and Adult Social Care Select Committee will check on progress six months after Cabinet responds. The Cabinet papers for 10 November are online, and the meeting starts at 10am.
Sources
- Buckinghamshire Council, report to Cabinet, 10 November 2026: Health and Adult Social Care Select Committee review of access to emergency care.
- Buckinghamshire Council, Appendix 1, the review group’s full report, agreed by the committee on 1 October 2026.
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