Granny of 89 takes to streets ...because US firm is closing her GP surgery after 63 years
FOR more than 60 years, Connie Scott has had a trusted GP surgery five minutes from home.
And although things have changed since the days when the family doctor knew all her children by name, it is still a precious service.
So when she received a letter saying the surgery was closing, she knew she had to do something to help. And she has.
The 89-year-old great-grandmother has become the face of her community’s fight to stop the Osler House surgery closing its doors. ‘I can’t tell you how angry I was when I got that letter,’ she said. ‘I wanted to go out on to the street and shout, “How dare they do this!”’
There was no public consultation over the closure of the surgery in Potter Street, a suburb in Harlow, Essex.
After the practice closes on Monday, Mrs Scott will have to make a 40-minute round trip taking four buses to get to a GP.
In a protest video, which has been viewed thousands of times online, she says: ‘I’m absolutely devastated. I moved down into Harlow in 1953 with two little babies. I have always lived in Potter Street and this has always been our surgery and I just feel that they have sold us out. It’s an absolute disgrace what they have done to us.’
Mrs Scott signed up as a patient at the surgery when it first opened in 1955. She and her late husband Bert moved to the area in 1953, attracted to the new town by the opportunities it promised away from a war-ravaged London.
The mother of three remembers the family doctor rushing to her home in the dead of night when her eldest daughter, Madeline, had meningitis.
‘The family doctor knew all my girls’ names and would ask after them,’ she said. ‘There was such a community feel about the place. The community even named a new estate, Meyrick Mead, after Dr John Meyrick, one of the original doctors at Osler House. But now there is such a huge turnover these days they don’t have time to get to know you.’
The first that Mrs Scott and the surgery’s 3,300 other patients knew about the closure was a letter informing them it was to shut in little over a month.
To add to the insult, patients found the surgery is run by a firm that is part owned by an American health insurance company based 4,000 miles away in St Louis, Missouri. The closure is one of scores across the country, with official figures revealing that two surgeries are now shutting a week.
Robert Halfon, Conservative MP for Harlow, said the lack of public consultation left no time to consider viable alternatives to closure.
He said the current GP was not asked to stay on and although other GP practices had been prepared to take Osler House on as a satellite surgery this had not been considered.
He also questioned why an alternative company was not found to run it after the current firm bowed out of its contract.
He said government funding to the West Essex Clinical Commissioning Group, which awards contracts to run surgeries, has increased every year – and recorded a surplus of £7.3million in 2016/17. ‘I am appalled by the way that this has been handled, I wasn’t even told as a local MP,’ he said.
‘I’ve made it very clear that I believe the closure to be a wrong decision. Harlow is a rapidly expanding town and it makes no sense to close a surgery which has been serving Potter Street for over 60 years. ‘I am very concerned that I received no prior notice of this closure and that the decision appears to have been reached without any consultation with patients, user groups, and the wider community.’
Mr Halfon has taken his complaint to NHS minister Steve Brine as CCGs have a legal duty to consider the impact a closure will have on the local community.
Mrs Scott takes a starring role in the online video, filmed as residents protested on the street about the loss of Osler House.
Later she told the Mail: ‘We have been told they are doing it because the surgery doesn’t have many patients. But 3,000 is not a small amount. It has all been done so underhand. ‘I wouldn’t have thought that they had the power to close that surgery without consultation. But they have got away with it.’
A spokesman for West Essex CCG said the Osler House patients were now registered with one of ten other surgeries in Harlow, three of which are within 1.2 miles.
The spokesman added the CCG had approached the five practices closest to the site to see if any could take it over but talks with two were unsuccessful.
NHS bosses have complained to the Home Office after 100 Indian doctors were denied visas to work in the UK. British doctors say immigration rules that cap non-EU skilled workers are harming patient safety because of a staff shortage in the NHS.
‘It’s an absolute disgrace’
What a way to run a health service. Until great-grandmother Connie Scott took up the fight against closing her local surgery, few were aware that the American giant responsible owns 50 such NHS practices in the UK. the upshot is that because of a decision made 4,000 miles away in Missouri, Mrs Scott faces a four bus, 40-minute round-trip to see the doctor, instead of the five-minute walk to the surgery she’s used since 1955. it’s impossible to argue with her verdict: ‘i just feel that they have sold us out.’