The New Surgery Tring: consultation outcome

Community, Health and Social Care

Following the retirement in February 2016 of the GP providing primary care services at The New Surgery in Tring, a caretaker contract was put in place so that patients could continue to receive GP services from that surgery.

Between 11 April and 20 May 2016, NHS England and Herts Valleys Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) ran a consultation that invited patients and other local interested parties to share their views with us about how the needs of patients in Tring could best be met in the long term.

The options we consulted on were:
Option 1: Contract a GP provider to provide services at The New Surgery
Option 2: Patients to register with another practice of their choice and The New Surgery to close

Overall we received 646 separate responses to the consultation as follows: 599 responses to the survey – 422 electronic and 177 paper copies. We received 25 written responses (via letter and email), 18 telephone calls and four other submissions including feedback from the 100 people who attended the three drop in sessions that were held at different times of the day on different dates.
We want to thank everyone who fed back their views.

We have now reviewed all of the responses to the consultation and have conducted an Equality and Health Inequality Analysis report that takes into account a number of factors including practice list sizes, capacity, health inequalities, population growth etc.

We are now able to confirm that NHS England and Herts Valleys CCG have agreed to support Option 1.

We have written to all patients registered at The New Surgery to inform them of this outcome and to reassure them that the current provider of services at The New Surgery – Herts Urgent Care – will have their caretaker contract extended until 31 March 2017.

In the meantime NHS England and Herts Valleys CCG will put the contract for The New Surgery out to tender and test the market. While the procurement process can take a number of months we aim to be in a position to announce by the end of 2016 or early in 2017 who has been awarded the contract to provide GP services at The New Surgery in future.

The full consultation report is available on Herts Valleys CCG website www.hertsvalleysccg.nhs.uk.