THE application to close St Damian’s Surgery on Spa Road has been turned down by the Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG).
The Bradford on Avon and Melksham Health Partnership (BoA&MHP), who manage the surgery, applied to the CCG in November last year to close St Damian’s by the end of March this year. The partnership stated that it had been unable to recruit enough clinicians following the retirement of three full-time GP partners.
The proposed closure sparked fears of a GP shortage for Melksham as St Damian’s 3,500 patients had been told that if the closure went ahead, they would either have to visit the partnership’s other surgery in Bradford-on-Avon or register with Melksham’s remaining GP practices – Giffords Surgery and Spa Medical Practice, with the latter announcing that they were not accepting any new registration requests.
A statement from Dr Janice Patrick and Partners at the BoA&MHP, said, “The BoA&MHP partners would like to inform our patients, that Wiltshire Clinical Commissioning Group have declined our proposal to close our St Damian’s branch surgery and amend our practice boundary, at this point.
“As a consequence of this announcement, we will need to re-assess the service provision across all of our four sites, in view of our workforce challenges. We will communicate any proposed changes to you in the coming weeks.”
