2040 vision will be a nightmare

The district’s new draft Local Plan vision highlights ‘Healthy Communities’ but fails to assess the impact on access to health services.

General practice and NHS dentistry are in crisis - ‘2,294 patients per GP, an increase of 7% since 2019’ [RCGP report].

The figure is worse for NHS dentists, with children particularly at risk.

It is difficult to get a GP appointment or home visit, blood pressure tests are by robot, NHS dentists are scarce, hospital waiting lists longer, ‘visit your pharmacy first’ the new NHS slogan. Kent and Canterbury does not have a major A&E department. The Plan boasts of ‘new primary healthcare facilities’, ‘proportionate contributions for primary healthcare’ (from the developers) ‘the delivery of a new or improved Kent and Canterbury Hospital’. Aspirations read as certainties as though this manifesto, for a brave new Canterbury, will provide services

for a massive local population increase.

The increase would require an additional 30+ GPS and an equal number of dentists.

From where will they come? Ask any surgery if they find it easy to recruit a new GP. Even 30 more GPS and dentists, conjured through the magic of the ‘vision’, would not improve the patient-gp/dentist ratio. Appointments will remain difficult to secure.

A more likely outcome is that the vision becomes a nightmare.there will not be 30 more GPS and dentists, no new hospital, waiting lists persist, queues at pharmacies, not just for prescriptions but the expanding list of ‘conditions’ for which the NHS tell us they are best. Health outcomes will deteriorate. Councillors and officers insist there is no alternative and no basis for exception. It is not as though Canterbury is not building new homes – 15,168 already approved but whether the proposed 24,514 is too high for the real needs, health, infrastructure, heritage, environment.

There is an overwhelming Canterbury case for exception against the single, arbitrary, outdated, national housing needs formula.

In responding to the ’consultation’ (deadline June 3), we should urge our representatives to make the case for exception so that, as they assert, Canterbury might perhaps

become a district of ‘Healthy Communities’.

John Reilly