Relocation plans for expanding medical practice in Sudbury
Plans to relocate the Hardwicke House Group Medical Practice has applied for funding from NHS England to relocate from its outgrown, listed Stour Street surgery and Meadow Lane surgery to a single new purpose-built facility in the town.
Hardwicke House Group Practice, which currently supports 22,800 patients in the Sudbury area, expect the patient population to rise by 18 per cent over the next decade. The £5 million plans will enable the 15-GP medical practice to meet this demand and provide improved healthcare services in the area.
”We are currently working out of inadequate surgery premises in Stour Street and Meadow Lane,” says Dr Jamie Gilmour, a Partner at the Practice. “Our surgery at Hardwicke House is a listed building originally built in the 16th Century and not suitable for modern healthcare provision and we have no additional capacity elsewhere in Sudbury.”
The funding application was made as NHS England invited GPs across the country to apply to the Governmentâs £1 billion Primary Care Infrastructure Fund which seeks to improve primary care facilities and increase access to primary care services.
The proposed new medical centre would provide a mixture of consultation, treatment and training spaces as well as a minor operations suite and flexible accommodation for use by other partner agencies.
Hardwicke House Practice has posted the design proposals for the new medical centre in the Stour Street surgery. If successful, it would move within the next two years.
”Over the past 10 years, the Practice has requested funding support from the NHS to relocate to new premises, however it has been overlooked on three separate occasions,” says David Cripps, Hardwicke House Group Practice Manager.
”The focus within Sudbury has been on the West Suffolk Hospitals relocation from the St Leonards and Walnut Tree Hospitals to a health centre on the outskirts of the town. New surgery premises will give us greater flexibility to work more collaboratively with partner agencies, such as Social Care, and allied health professionals and this will enable us to offer more expansive services to our patients than we can currently offer due to the lack of spare capacity within our existing surgery premises. Our team has grown to 15 GPs in order that levels of access keep pace with the growth in patients registering with the practice, but this cannot continue indefinitely.”
Hardwicke House Groups application is supported by the West Suffolk Clinical Commissioning Group, Suffolk County Council and the Chair of Suffolks Health & Wellbeing Board.
The Practice will find out whether its application has been successful at the end of this month.
