Have your say on the Circle Room sexual health clinic

We started funding the Circle Room clinic because of a lack of face-to-face sexual health services in the local area. It was targeted at people not registered with a GP. The clinic started 12 years ago and was originally run by the School Hill Surgery in Lewes.

The funding was for a weekly, three-hour clinic to be provided on a drop-in basis, so that young people who weren’t registered with the GP practice could still use it. Most young people who used the clinic in the early years weren’t registered with the practice.

The clinic offers the following services:

• sexual health consultation
• contraception
• condoms
• Emergency Hormonal Contraception (EHC)
• Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) screening
• HIV screening

Local authorities across the country are experiencing cost pressures and East Sussex is no different. This means looking carefully at our spending. A lot has changed locally since the clinic was first set up. As a result, we feel that it may no longer be the best use of public funding.

The proposal to stop the funding is based on the following factors:

• The four GP practices in Lewes have merged to form Foundry Healthcare and the practices offer contraception services to all their registered patients.
• The majority of people who use the clinic are already registered with Foundry Healthcare and most of those who aren’t don’t live in East Sussex.
• There has been a growth in alternative services that are available online and through pharmacies.

The clinic is for young people aged up to 25 years old. It sees an average of over 50 people a month. The majority of those who use the clinic are patients of Foundry Healthcare. For example, between April 2024 and March 2025, three quarters were registered patients (465 out of 612 people or 75%).

If the clinic closed, young people would be able to get the same services through their: 

• GP practice for contraception
• online services for STI testing, condoms and Emergency Hormonal Contraception (www.eastsussexsexualhealth.co.uk)
• pharmacies for contraception, STI testing, condoms and EHC (the website above helps people find services near them)
• sexual health clinics in Avenue Road, Eastbourne and Station Plaza, Hastings (these clinics are led by medical consultants, and they manage complex sexual health cases – there is more information about them at the website above)

It’s possible that if the clinic closed young people in the area might visit sexual health clinics outside of the county, such as in Brighton. When this happens, the Council is charged a fee by the clinics. This is a nationally agreed arrangement.

We think it is unlikely that lots of young people in the Lewes area would use out-of-county services if the clinic closed. This is because most of the 25% of people who use the clinic, but aren’t registered with Foundry Healthcare’s GP practices, don’t live in East Sussex.

We are required to consult before we decide whether to go ahead with the proposal. Our focus for the consultation is on hearing from young people who have used the clinic. What they tell us will help us to understand how people would be affected by the closure and what services they would use instead.

A decision on whether to go ahead with the proposal will be made by the Lead Member for Adult Social Care and Health before the end of the year. The results of the consultation will be considered alongside a report that sets out our recommendations and an Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA). An EqIA is a tool we use to understand how particular groups and communities would be affected by a proposed change.

If the proposal was agreed, we would work closely with the provider to let people know the clinic was closing and tell them about the alternative services they could use.