Patients deserve an explanation

Your headline story last week concerning the latest ‘surgery shake-up’ following the resignation of a doctor, looks like another ‘iceberg’ tale where 90 per cent of the facts lie hidden beneath the surface.

On Friday, October 27, patients registered at Cornwallis Plaza GP Practice, many of them displaced from local surgeries which have previously been closed down, started receiving letters from Hastings & Rother Clinical Commissioning Group.

This letter tells them that if they live outside the Cornwallis Plaza Practice boundary they would need to find another GP as quickly as they can. This would mean that at the very least all patients from the now closed Essenden Road Surgery, absorbed previously by Cornwallis Plaza, were now without a doctor.

Please bear in mind that many of these patients require repeat prescriptions for serious, sometimes life threatening conditions.

Apparently, HRCCC have now confirmed that ‘the wrong letter was sent out’ and newly displaced patients will be automatically registered at other practices. But this letter was surely drafted for a purpose, hopefully not for use at a later date. The anxiety and alarm this letter would have caused to those receiving it, particularly the more vulnerable amongst us, certainly deserves a general apology and some explanation.