Old Colwyn (East) Residents’ Association
Minute of a talk by Mr John Hardy, Wednesday 12th December 2007
Plans for a Health Precinct at Colwyn Leisure Centre.
Mr. Hardy outlined that the plans for a refurbishment at the Colwyn Leisure Centre necessarily has a detailed project management framework.
With any such large project, there are a number of stages during the project where if alarm bells start to ring in terms of costs going out of control or unforeseen unmanageable risks that have been identified, the project can be stopped.
The project has to be cost effective he said and it is always possible that something that was originally thought of as a good idea could be judged to be not a good idea in the light of new issues that come to light during the process.
The refurbishment at Colwyn Leisure Centre is a major project and it is being managed under a project management framework. There was always a danger he explained that if the Council outlined the planned scheme to the public too early, because of the framework, public expectation could have been raised only to be dashed at a later stage in the project management framework if it had to be withdrawn a couple of months later.
He said that this was probably the cause of uncertainty about what is happening. Tenders have been returned for the building work he said and until they were opened the team did not know if the builders agreed with their projections. The prices are within the business plan estimates. The project team is almost to the stage with just one signature required before the project can proceed.
He explained the need for balance between the need to consult / inform and the need not to raise expectations until the scheme is judged to be capable of success. He said that this is a problem with all large projects and is a matter for managers.
There are two categories of development in the Colwyn Leisure Centre project.
The first is refurbishment of a building which is now 26 years old and looking in need of a facelift. The General Activity Room and Nor’West Holst Room; what used to be a bar area and the corridors.
The General Activity Room is at present quite an unpleasant room built as a half~way sports hall / large room. It has blank walls and it echoes with a high roof. People do not like it because there are no windows.
The refurbishment will create sound baffling, windows and lower the ceilings. There will be new heating. It will be a far more pleasant room for multi use. There will also be a divider to enable two uses at the same time. This will increase the capacity and the flexibility for user groups.
The Nor’West Holst Room is a basic function room. It will be given a face lift and be refurbished, with new ceiling tiles, window frames, work on the walls and floor. It is not intended to change the nature of the room but to make it good for the next 25 years. There will be a room divider to allow flexibility and capacity for user groups.
The bar area which has been redundant for the last three years is going to be converted into a large fitness facility. It will be twice the size of the present facility with much more state of the art equipment and TVs. Each person will have a key which stores personal information and program information which automatically prepares the machine for individual use. At the end of a session it records the info for the instructor or physician to use via the internet with the person’s consent. It will be available to more people; the price will not increase more than normal.
Schools will use the facility. The schools will be able to use the details of what they do on the machines for process in literacy and numeracy via the internet. They can use the information for mathematics or other study purposes.
The corridors will all get a face lift with new tiles and paint and one of the roofs will have some work.
The old Reflexions as it stands at present will be converted into a smaller meeting room as there is a lot of demand for small meetings. Partly it will be a small meeting room and partly it will house the Conwy Intermediary Care Service which is a group of Council Health Professionals and NHS Health Professionals who go out into the community; they are physical therapists, occupational therapists, speech therapists who deal with people when they come out of hospital or need support; they give support for a period of six weeks.
The last bit of the refurbishment is the small weight training room. That will be turned into assessment rooms for doing the fitness testing and programming and they will also be available for hire by NHS Services clinics related to physical activity and active health.
One of the criticisms or comments that has been heard relates to this part of the scheme, there is no intention to move any services other than primary care services in to the Leisure Centre. Nothing will happen that affects anything that goes on in a hospital. If people run clinics in the centre, it will be to bring them into the community to make them more accessible. Those rooms will serve a joint purpose, Council employees and schools will use them for assessment, also there is presently a scheme of GP referrals; that will go on in the rooms. Persons sent by the GP because they would benefit from physical activity are sent to the centre, the staff do an assessment, a risk assessment, blood pressure and various tests and then they set them, a program.
That is the refurbishment part of the project to make the building fresh. Nothing is going away; there is a net gain in activity space for the reasons explained. More activities will be catered for.
Questions before the Health precinct issue.
Cliff Prout ~ It is going to be a massive financial investment and I wondered where the money was coming from.
Answer ~ It is a self financing project, basically a mortgage over a twenty year period under a prudential borrowing scheme that the council can now access. The improvements will be made to the facility and the income that will generated by the larger facility will pay off the mortgage over a twenty year period. The business case shows that the Council will conservatively be £600,000 better off having implemented the plan.
A resident ~ A report in the North Wales Weekly News said that £500.000 would be ploughed in from a National Health Service Trust, to bring people in with multiple sclerosis and heart troubles into that room with seventeen permanent staff there. Everyone was saying why you are bringing hospital facilities in there, why do they not go to Abergele or Llandudno. Is it true that they are going to plough that money in to the project?
Answer ~ This comes under the second bit and I will answer that question. It is a prudential borrowing scheme, business planned over 20 years. The professionals have told the council that the projections are conservative. JJB and Fitness First are multi millionaire businesses because they run fitness centres. The intention with this project is to provide really good facilities to Conwy and Colwyn at a reasonable price but to turn the profit back into the facility.
A Resident ~The new Reflexions fitness centre sounds very capital intensive, what cost are you talking about?
Answer ~ the equipment will cost £180,000 and has a workable life span of 7 years.
The resident continued ~ so to renew about three times over the 20 years, your £600,000 profit is spent on machines?
Answer ~ No that has all been taken into account in the business case calculations.
The resident continued by asking if there was sufficient call for such facilities. It seemed he said a lot of money to invest in one room every seven years. He asked how many of the community actually want such a facility and will the council be able to fill it?
Answer ~ To fill it in the sort of income that the council has projected requires around 600 members. Denbigh have recently opened a small room half the size with fitness equipment in it. They currently have 300 members and 250 on a waiting list. The fallback situation at the end of 7 years if it did not work then the council would not do it again. Things could change, things go out of fashion but the council does not expect that. To answer the question, yes there is a demand for that kind of facility.
Resident ~ Is this one of the higher earners of all the facilities in the building. Do you think it will be supporting the rest of the activities?
Answer ~ Yes it does, fitness at the moment, with 17 year old equipment, we take in about £190,000 per annum on the fitness area.
A Resident ~ Can you guarantee that the classes that are already there … (I am with the “Evergreens” who as you know do keep fit there and some of us go at least two or three times a week) … are not going to be shunted off somewhere else or we don’t have to start looking for somewhere else to go to.
Answer ~ Absolutely not, we have phased the operation so as to move through the phases to achieve the minimum amount of disruption.
The resident ~ We know that you are improving things but we want to know when all the disruption has been done are we still going to have somewhere to hold our classes. Sometimes there are 30+ of us in the room and we have been sent from pillar to post over the years to accommodate others small groups who want a meeting.
Answer ~ Exactly and that’s one of the issues that we are addressing with the small meeting room and the room dividers, to try and keep as many people as possible happy. The evergreens are a key user of the centre and we want to see it maintained and see it grow.
The resident ~ You will guarantee here and now, that we will still have a place.
Answer ~ Where do I sign?
A resident ~ Presumably the equipment will be similar in type to that in the centre in Rhos on Sea?
Answer ~ Yes and the new equipment in Llandudno Junction.
The Chair ~ Is anything happening to the sports hall?
Answer ~ Not in this part of the scheme but the maintenance, the floor and painting….
The Chair ~ what about the emergency exit doors in there because they are dangerous aren’t they?
Answer ~ The edges on the doors are dangerous for two reasons, because of the shape that they are when the were built in to the building and also the nature of the five a side football that is played in there. There are two options to address that. Number 1 to architecturally do something with the doors and the other is to change the nature of the five a side football to play a style of 5 a side that is played within lines and not rebounded of the wall.
The Chair ~ I just thought that simple cushions would be a very good answer, fixed to the doors so that when they are shut, they are flush with the walls.
Answer ~ that is being looked into.
The Chair ~ That is important because I have seen some lads get quite badly hurt in there.
Mr. Hardy ~ That concludes the refurbishment element and I would add that it is difficult to get capital funding allocated to anywhere in Conwy at present simply because of the tightness of budgets all the way down from the Welsh Assembly. So Colwyn Leisure Centre is 25 years old, it is in need of refurbishment and this is a scheme that allows us to do that without having to go cap in hand to the capital funders of the council which in the current circumstances, we would be very unlikely to succeed given the prioritisation of so many other necessary schemes in Conwy. We are doing it in a self funding way by this scheme.
Next, the other part of the project which seems to have caused the concern by its title. It was only ever used as a working title for the refurbishment program and the focus has dwelt on this issue and it became known as the Health Precinct. The Health Precinct is one very small part of a very large project.
Starting with the Conwy Intermediary Health Team, they are physical therapists and occupational therapists and deal with people who have the potential to benefit greatly from physical activity, hip operations, stroke victims, knee operations, diabetes, obesity, general ill health. They work with people for a period of six weeks support.
In the Leisure Centre, for a number of years we have been running a GP referral scheme. This was started by the Centre as an initiative. The centre has a specialist sports science team and the GPs have the people who can benefit from exercise.
The physical therapists work with them for six weeks and then hand them over to Centre staff for structured support, for safe appropriate exercise.
Resident ~ Do they pay for that support?
Answer ~ They pay a pound a week. In the last twelve months, the Welsh Assembly has provided a pilot program in GP referral to test if the scheme that our Centre piloted, actually works. We are given some subsidy from the WAG.
We see that the Centre is the next stage in the supportive continuum for people who have been in hospital or been treated by physiotherapists in the C.I. Care Team.
Physiotherapists, doctors, medical professionals, dieticians all now have the ability to refer into our program for physical activity in a supportive environment.
The benefit of having the Conwy Intermediary Care Team based in the Centre with Centre professionals is that for the first time ever, certainly in Wales is that the Medical professionals and the fitness professionals can pass a patient from medical care to community care and they can talk direct to each other about the individuals and liaise about suitable activities. There is a good chance that development of treatment in a wider sense may come from the liaison in this new team approach.
That is the crux of the Health Precinct, professionals under one roof to support the community. In the Bay of Colwyn there are 6,096 who are registered as suffering from chronic illness in the last census in 2003.
School children, healthy adults, young people are targeted to make use of the Leisure Centre. The Precinct is for a portion of the population that is poorly served by the making available of physical activity.
A resident If there are as you say 6,000 people in the area, if you are going to get a small percentage say two or three hundred a week, whereabouts in the Centre are they going to do this with these people as they will all be doing different things, swimming etc. how will that be incorporated with the existing clients.
Answer ~ Yes undoubtedly there will be a limit to how many we can deal with. The refurbishment will provide more opportunity and there are time slots and it will be about management of the resources. There will be a management programming operation to match people with resources, the gym will be twice as big, twice as much equipment….
A resident ~ They already have facilities twice a week in Abergele and there are already multiple sclerosis people in wheelchairs who come and go in the lift and they are seen to and climb on the machines. So that is already in place there in Abergele, so it’s no real difference is it?
Answer ~ As I explained, the difference is the bringing together of the professionals under one roof for a continuum of care whereas a doctor in Llanrwst may say “go and see the people in Abergele”. In the Health Precinct, the physio who has been looking after the patient will be in the Centre with them, handing them over. This will remove a known social barrier to people getting involved in exercise.
A Resident ~ Where are these people going to park?
Answer ~ There are 110 car park spaces in the car park by the front entrance. 50 may be used by Eirias High and people who work across the road. We can manage that because we have control. If people are not Leisure Centre users they can be refused access. It needs management, there are enough spaces.
Residents ~ Teachers have their own car park but I don’t think they use it because youngsters kick balls around there in dinner time.
I think there should be a different place for school coaches to park, either a different area or bring them in a different way. They block off the disabled bays.
Answer ~ We are considering a disabled persons drop-off area outside the front door. We cannot say to people “You cannot use the Centre because we cannot find you a car park”. We will manage the issue.
Question from Chair ~ What about the money from the NHS?
Answer ~ Colwyn Leisure Centre is a council building, the council has a duty to keep it in a usable condition. Much work is required to refurbish. The ownership will not change. The NHS is not taking control of the building. It is about making Leisure facilities more available to more people. There is no responsibility on the NHS or a requirement from the council for the NHS to put money into the project. There is a possibility that the money from the Welsh Assembly as with the GP referral, may become a permanent funding stream.
The persons referred to the centre from the Health Service professionals provides a critical mass of persons which gives a benefit to Leisure Services to allow professionally qualified persons in the industry to get quality jobs in the leisure services industry.
It is a known issue previously that degree qualified persons would have to work half their time as a lifeguard or bar person to make a living income, simply because there was not a critical mass of activity in their respective fields of expertise.
The NHS will provide some operational funding, desks, telephones and that sort of thing but no responsibility for the capital upkeep of the building.
Councillor Squire ~ Just a quick one; it has been a very explicit presentation, very much in keeping with my understanding of what the project was to be. Can you give me some assurances though that there will be no consideration at all of needle exchange or drug intervention in the place.
Answer ~ There is a change of use application to Planning and that will deal with the activities of the Intermediary Care Team. The intention is not to exclude anything unless Planning Department says that there is a grant of Change of Use with conditions that certain actions are not allowed. The intention is not specifically to have drug intervention. We will comply with restrictions on use.
Councillor Squire ~ We need safeguards put in place when it comes to planning or someone just might try and get their foot in the door.
Answer ~ we don’t see it as our role to exclude anything at this stage, it could quickly grow into a list. The room is there, the rooms will be there for activities related to physical activities.
A resident ~ It would stop a lot of people coming to the Leisure Centre.
A resident ~ Can you see any other patient care groups being moved in there in future?
Answer ~ Patients can attend, if they will benefit from physical activity and if we can accommodate them then we would need a good reason to say ‘no we will not consider that particular group of people’.
Resident ~ what I am coming to is if you are having more people referred there and then I want to use the Centre for a swim or the gym and find that there are a tremendous number of people in there and I can’t get in.
Answer ~ At the heart of that question, we come up against the Disability Discrimination Act. We have to make our facilities available to everyone. If someone wants to use a public facility, they have every right to do so. Our intention is to encourage everybody right across the board.
Resident ~ Is it going to get to the stage where other members of the public are going to be excluded because there is not enough room because you are moving all the other activities in.
Answer ~ I think then you are getting into an “us and them” situation.
The resident ~ It is not an “us and them” situation if you are bringing more and more activities in all the time eventually you get to a point…
Answer ~ That comes back to my point that we are not in the business of excluding one group of people to let another group of people in. Our intention always has to be to make it as available as possible to as many people as possible.
An example, not the same but similar, about 2 or 3 yrs ago we had 800 children on a waiting list for swimming lessons. We did not have sufficient time allocated to swimming lessons and they could not access the lessons. We thought that was unreasonable for so many local children. We reconfigured the timing of our classes and general opening times to fit more lessons in. That did not suit some people. One man in particular did not like it because he went swimming on Saturday morning and watched football in the afternoon. We could not accommodate him.
We realise that there are people with differing demands that we have to try and accommodate to the best of our ability.
Question ~ What is your catchment area?
Answer ~ traditionally in demographic terms, or industry standards, they say a three mile drive.
Question ~ If I did not know better, it sounds as if you have to be sent by your doctor.
Answer ~ That is why I emphasised that the Health Precinct part of the project is just a very small part of the overall project; it is one of sixteen different segments of our operation. We want as many people as possible to attend and use it from all groups of society. We have segments of the resident population which we want to target and we ask what we can put on to attract a particular group of people to enjoy the facility.
“Evergreens” are a segment, mothers with young children are a segment, fourteen to sixteen year old boys are a segment, and eighteen to twenty five year old males are another.
The Health Precinct segment has been concentrated upon because we used it as the working title of the project. We should have called it the Colwyn Leisure Centre refurbishment project.
A resident ~ At the start of your talk you spoke of the misconception and confusion because you were unable perhaps to release information until contracts had nearly been signed. Under the project management process do you have any stakeholder groups? For instance we have a Council Promenade Project which has gone to consultation with a lot of different ideas so that people can feed back on that and obviously in this instance you have not gone down that route; so you are making decisions about what people want as opposed to opening out to the community and letting them tell you what they want.
Answer ~ As I say there are two bits to it. There is the refurbishment of the Centre which everybody tells us was needed, numerous focus groups and meetings and customer comments have fed into that with support for refurbishment.
The Health Precinct bit, we have had deep and wide ranging discussions with stroke victims, MS sufferers, cardiac rehabilitation because those were the segments that the precinct addressed. I take your point on a wider view, telling people what is going on that is where I don’t think we got it right. We are going to have to think really hard for future projects where there is a danger of building expectations that may later have to be withdrawn. We could have shown pictures and plans of the project about our intentions. We took the view that something in the process could have broken down causing us to have to withdraw.
Peter Lawrence ~ My point is we have two projects which are council run, one is a consultative approach and the other is ‘this is what we are going to do we can’t tell you yet in case it falls apart…’
A resident ~ The promenade gave four choices but with a project like this, each room is a new choice decision so it gets terribly complicated.
Answer ~ I do accept the criticism that there was probably a different way to do the consultation but we will learn from that. We need to think really hard, I don’t think there is an easy answer. If it was that easy we would have done it.
Secretary ~ There is just one question that came to me while you were talking, it is probably totally wrong. I remember that when Dan’s Den was being talked about some funding was promised from a source that I do not remember. At some stage perhaps a year ago, I heard that the funding had fallen through and that the funding had been applied to the Leisure Centre. Is this project something that has diverted money away from Dan’s Den? I know that the foundations of Dan’s Den are being explored recently so it may be moving on.
Answer ~ that’s the Flying Start project, it’s a completely independent project. I don’t know the detail so I cannot comment. Dan’s Den and Flying start were cooperating and then they parted company. Flying Start will be locating in Eirias Park but not as part of our project. It is separate within Children’s services in the Council.
Councillor Squire ~ There are two youth workers starting work in Old Colwyn and engaging at night with youth on the street. They are confident they will have a significant impact. It will tie in with the use of the Red Cross Centre. The Youth Workers are dead keen and there is a lot of activity going on in Old Colwyn. That is tying in with Flying Start.
The Chair thanked Mr Hardy for attending and giving such a good talk.
There was a round of applause.
