Walk-in GP service based at Telford's Princess Royal Hospital to close

The Malling Health Wrekin walk-in centre, based next to Telford's Princess Royal Hospital, is to close in July, Telford and Wrekin Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has announced.

The decision has been taken to close the centre, opened in 2009, as its contract is up for renewal, the centre has staffing issues relying on locum GPs, and half a million will have to be spent on the ageing demountable building it is based in.

Aside from walk-in facilities, Malling Health Wrekin has 8,000 patients on the books, which will now have to transfer to another local GP.

Dr Jo Leahy, clinical chair of Telford and Wrekin CCG, said registered patients should not "panic" as they would all be receiving a letter in the next few weeks advising them what to do next.

She said: "The building housing the practice is in extremely poor condition and we cannot justify the cost of replacement when other practices have excellent premises and can take additional patients."

There was ongoing work to improve access to other regular GP surgeries for longer hours, and the CCG would be looking into other ways to increase provision across the weekends in the centre's absence, she said.

With long waits and staffing issues at Princess Royal's A&E making the headlines, she said she understood how the closing of walk-in centre might worry people but, she said: "We don't actually think that it will make very much difference at all.

"Theoretically it could have been used to take the stress off A&E but we don't believe that it was.

"There are only so many slots at the walk-in centre per day and quite a lot of people would turn up and be redirected to A&E.

"We can see why people would be worried about that but we've looked at that very carefully."

In fact an analysis revealed it has not been functioning as a walk-in centre should, she said – which is to offer a GP service to people not registered locally or who could not get an urgent same-day appointment at their own practice.

She said instead the centre was mainly used by patients as a regular GP, and the majority of walk-in patients were those same ones.

She said the centre was set up due to a directive from Government but the idea had always been "London-centric", designed for large cities with lots of tourists and long-distance commuters.

"It was never going to be suitable for an area like this one," she said.

Nationally many had now shut and a second one locally – Malling Health Telford in Telford Town Centre – already closed in summer 2016.

"We've really found that in recent years it's not been meeting the needs of the populace of Telford and Wrekin," she said.

The decision will be formally ratified by the CCG's Primary Care Committee on February 7, and is expected to close at the end of July, with all patients transferred to another GP.