The NHS has to evolve in order to survive – but we did seem to get more than our fair share of closures over one comparatively short period of time.

Here’s a brief résumé.

I’ve already mentioned that Clements House Surgery in South Woodham Ferrers town centre (Dr Praful’s old practice) closed in late 2013. The decision wasn’t popular with patients – and nor was the way it was handled. I conducted a ‘mini-survey’ when the dust settled to see if the patients had forgiven the PCT for the way it acted. They hadn’t. The results were damning.

As Greenwood Surgery was permanently on the brink of closure, at the beginning of 2014 I changed my name by deed poll to: ‘John Cormack – the Family Doctor who works for the NHS for free’. I naively hoped that this would put pressure on the NHS ‘powers that be’ to fund the practice fairly. It soon became apparent that, so long as these people were getting their fat pay packets and generous perks, they weren’t at all interested in lesser problems … like patient care.

We followed this up with a song based on an old Eddie Cochran number called ‘Summertime Blues’.. My son Marcus recorded me ‘singing the track (if you can call it ‘singing’) and the wonderful SWF photographer, Tracy Hayden, translated our efforts into a video. The song was called ‘GP Blues’. (You may have to click on ‘Browse YouTube’ – and skip the ad)

It seemed to go down well. One patient told me that he was being taken to hospital by ambulance and the crew, having spotted my name on the documentation, asked him if he’d heard the song. He said he hadn’t – so they played it to him at full volume for the remainder of the journey. He didn’t tell me if he felt this had helped or hindered his recovery.

As for further closures, towards the end of 2014 there was an announcement that the walk-in health centre at Sainsbury’s, Springfield, would be closing in March 2015. I mentioned previously that this was ‘created’ at great expense following a decree by Lord Darzi that these centres should be set up all over the country in the hope that they would take a lot of the pressure off A&E departments. Needless to say, there was no evidence that they would succeed in this objective. The service was run by private companies who were laughing all the way to the bank. The NHS was charged around £55 for each consultation (which, from memory, was considerably more than half of the sum my practice received from the NHS for looking after a patient for a year). Most patients appeared to have been seen by nurses and quite a high proportion ended up being sent to see their GP or referred on to A&E. It was costing an arm and a leg to run – but the problem was that it’s very easy to open a new NHS facility but very difficult to close it – so the situation dragged on … and on. Eventually, following an admission that it wasn’t meeting its goal of reducing A&E visits, it was closed … but not before many NHS £millions had been poured down the drain. In 2016 ‘Chelmer Healthcare’ produced an independent report on Greenwood Surgery that revealed yet again how close we were to closure given that no other GP would at that time have been crazy enough to take on a practice with such a tiny budget. This, to a large extent reflected the points made in previous reports – including the aforementioned report by Debbie Elam (a knowledgeable practice manager) – and the conclusions arrived at by my accountant (who looked after a large number of NHS practices but told me that I was the only one of her clients who had ever made a “pensionable loss.”)

I should point out that GPs can decide how the payments received from the NHS to run their practice are spent. So I could, for example, have cut my coat according to my cloth. This would have involved sacking most of the staff and providing a lousy service (and this is what the financial pressure from the NHS was pushing us towards). This would have allowed me to receive regular payments for the work I did … but it would have also meant that our patients would have received a crap service … and we didn’t see why they should be made to suffer the consequences of the profligacy and inadequacy of those running the show. Wind forward to 2017 and ‘The Practice’ (formerly known as ‘The New Surgery’) was finally laid to rest having been a substantial financial drain on the coffers of ‘the local NHS’ since 2004. It was set up to be run by Dr McGeachy but it seemed that he cut back to spending one day a week at the earliest opportunity in order to allow himself more time to work for the PCT – and we were told that he ceased all input to the ‘New Surgery’ when it was taken over by The Practice.

You’ll recall that the bids from the local GPs to take over the running of this practice were summarily rejected without any public consultation … prior to it being handed over to the private sector. We were told that a “patient representative” had been asked to advise and had done so without ascertaining the views of any of the genuine patients of the practice. The practice and PCT staff refused to identify this ‘representative’ … and have continued to do so to this day. Needless to say, no ethical organisation would condone such duplicitous tactics!

When The Practice’ shut its doors the patients were absorbed by the other practices in the town who were able to provide the same services at greatly reduced cost. Unfortunately, however, the Mid Essex PCT had signed a 20 year lease so that payment for the premises continued. (The annual cost was in excess of £100,000 a year – which compared unfavorably with the total cost of the nearby practices which between them looked after considerably more patients).

While all this was going on the town centre Health Clinic was quietly being run down in an attempt to close it without creating too much of a stir … but more of that in next week’s exciting episode!

Dr John Cormack