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Credit to Keep the NHS Public campaigners
• WE welcome Camden Primary Care Trust’s decision not to go ahead with a super-size polyclinic on the hospital grounds in Bloomsbury (Campaigners’ victory in fight against a polyclinic, November 20).
We are all in favour of improving GP services so that minor diagnostic and other treatment can be undertaken through primary care services rather than hospitals. But this needs to be done sensitively, taking into account the importance of human-scale services for many people. Hospitals can just be too vast and impersonal for many of us. Grouping together large practices on a hospital site defeats the purpose of ensuring that people get a broader personal and local service from the easier to navigate facilities of their GP practice.
It’s good to see that the PCT have reached this conclusion as well. Much of the credit for this must be given to the tenacious and well-organised Keep the NHS Public campaigners.
I am impressed by the strength of this campaign my party strongly supports and the number of people who have joined it to ensure that positive aspects of our much-loved NHS are not lost.
Cllr Maya de Souza
Green Party, Highgate ward
Best of care?
• I AGREE with June Swan’s concerns over the Camden Road Surgery (Letters, November 20).
As a patient there for some 30 years I can say that I have only ever had the very best of medical care from my GP and the many locums that I have consulted there, but I am very concerned about the takeover by UnitedHealth. The staff I have spoken to tell me they are not happy with the new arrangement and many patients share their concerns.
At the time of the privatisation, the existing doctors put in a bid to run the surgery themselves within the NHS but their proposal was dismissed peremptorily. The PCT was determined to introduce this transatlantic experiment and no counter-offer by the experienced and caring doctors was to be allowed to get in their way.
There will have to be a review of the situation in a few years’ time.
Let us hope that common sense will prevail and the surgery will be returned to the care of the doctors themselves.
Peter Preston
Broadfield Lane, NW1
Pushed out
• I STRONGLY agree with June Swan about the Camden Road Surgery (Surgery locums coming and going, November 20). The health of this surgery has gone down and down since UnitedHealth took over its administration on April 1.
Patients used to get same-day appointments when they phoned. Now it can take a week to get an appointment when you are finally lucky enough to have the phone answered.
And though the remaining doctors are fine, excellent people have been pushed out of the practice and are sorely missed. If this is what happens when private companies take over practices I very much hope that the PCT will think very hard before putting any more out to tender.
Maeve O’Connor
Rossendale Way, NW1 |
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