Over recent years, the GPs at Kennington Health Centre have been working extremely hard to meet the challenges facing the practice, many of which also affect GP practices up and down the country. The main difficulty lies in recruiting permanent new doctors due to a national shortage of GPs and the high workload in the practice. There are also continued increases in the work expected from GPs and the complexity of running the business side of the surgery which increase the pressure on GP partners further.

While the doctors at the surgery remain very committed to providing high quality patient care, they have reluctantly given notice to Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (OCCG) to terminate their contract to provide medical services at the surgery, as they feel unable to continue to maintain the current workload.

OCCG is looking at a range of options to continue providing GP services at the surgery; it has started discussions with nearby practices about one of them delivering services from the Kennington Health Centre site. This option would allow current GPs at the practice to focus exclusively on providing patient care.

Dr Rosamond Hall, a GP partner at Kennington Health Centre, said: ‘The GPs want to continue to provide medical care to patients without having to run the business side of the practice.  This would enable the GPs to concentrate on providing clinical work while the administrative and business roles were undertaken by another provider who would have the responsibility for provision of adequate numbers of GPs and supporting staff in order to maintain patient care.’

Dr Hall said: ‘The high level of patient care we provide is reflected in the latest Care Quality Commission inspection report which shows the inspection team was satisfied with all aspects of our service and awarded us ‘good’ ratings in all fields. We intend this to continue and are working with OCCG on the development of future GP care in Kennington.

‘We have written to patients to reassure them it will be business as usual at the surgery, and that patients will continue to receive support, advice and a high level of care from doctors and all practice staff over the coming months while an option for the future is sought.’

OCCG and the GPs have met with the surgery’s patient participation group to inform them of the situation and will keep them up to date with further developments.

For further information please contact Julie Dandridge, Deputy Director Delivery and Localities, Head of Primary Care at Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group julie.dandridge@oxfordshireccg.nhs.uk