“We are very excited about the future of this hospital,” says Dr Tina Kenny, medical director at Buckinghamshire Healthcare NHS Trust, as she shows me around Marlow Community Hospital, on Victoria Road.

“It is going really, really well so far but we are only just starting. Fame is spreading far and wide.”

The hospital has just started trialling a new six-month “community hub” pilot, which sees the Trust investing £1 million in a bid to bring care closer to people’s homes.

Clinicians will not use the 20 inpatient beds at Marlow and Thame hospitals - instead the space will be used to run “frailty assessment clinics” which bosses say will benefit 350 older people.

While Dr Kenny and staff at the hospital are positive about the pilot, healthcare campaigners and members of the public have expressed concern about the future of the hospital and protested about the loss of beds.

“I think it is because it’s something different but people don’t really understand the difference yet. It may be because we have only just opened our doors and people haven’t had the chance to even get involved with the service yet or see what we are trying to do,” Dr Kenny said.

“The concern has been about beds but actually there are still plenty of beds here. It is about a new model of care – we are trying to break down the walls between a person’s home and the services they need.

“The beds are exactly the same, but what we are doing is using the space and the beds in a different way. The physio department used to share the dining area so we couldn’t offer as much physiotherapy as we wanted, but there is now a bespoke room.”

Patients who would have stayed in the hospital before the pilot started will instead be treated at home where possible.

While some have seen this as a negative, Dr Kenny says treating frail older patients in their own home is important.

She said: “In a perfect world we would like to deliver as many services as we can in the patient’s home, where appropriate.

“There is always going to be a very small proportion of patients who absolutely need to be in hospital or need to have higher intensity care, but what we know about particularly frail patients - patients now are perhaps different to patients of a number of years ago – they are much more complex, they have many more disease processes going on at the same time and they are on a wider variety and complexity of medication.

“If we bring them into hospital, they can deteriorate by virtue of the fact they are in bed and immobile and in a foreign environment to them.”

When the NHS was first founded in 1948, 48 per cent of the population died aged under 65. In 2014, that number was 14 per cent.

“The shape of our population is changing and the shape of healthcare that is needed has to change too.

“People can deteriorate and their muscles can deteriorate, if an older person is in hospital for about ten days it can be the equivalent of ten years’ worth of deterioration so it’s important to keep people at home.”

The key feature of the new pilot is flexibility, says Jane Skippen, divisional chief nurse.

“We don’t want to label rooms because we want to be able to meet the needs of anyone who needs us.

“Patients that come into this service will have a whole raft of medical needs so we might be able to use this room to give someone some IV meds, some oxygen, or we could do an ECG.

“Sometimes we might just need to monitor a patient’s blood pressure over a few hours. We might also have a therapy-led class. The space is quite fluid – we are trying to tailor it to patient’s needs.”

As well as being able to use rooms for different activities, the hospital has also made closer ties with voluntary organisations like Age Concern and Health Matters as well as the library service.

In response to fears about the hospital closing, Dr Kenny said it is “absolutely not on the cards.”

She said: “We want to be able to add outpatient clinics that we haven’t been able to do before like orthopaedics, palliative care medicine, oral surgery, respiratory services.

“I don’t think we would be doing that if we were thinking of closing the building. We want it to be a vibrant health and wellbeing centre.”