Whitchurch Road Surgery needed a new building to help provide the best possible care to patients, without isolating their existing patients by moving to a new location miles away from their former premises.
The new building has given the practice team the modern space it needs to care for its growing patient population with more consulting rooms, a spacious reception and waiting area, a dedicated treatment area including space for minor surgery and a pharmacy unit . The building also used materials that would enable it to blend in seamlessly to the surrounding area.
The building that the practice used to operate from was a three-storey converted terraced house, which was built in the 1800s.
From there, the practice were already serving more than 8,000 patients but that number was set to grow to more than 10,000 with local population growth and new housing, so more space for delivering care was absolutely vital.
“This is a major step for our patients and staff and will enable us to deliver primary care services in a building that is suitable to meet the demand capacity required. The new premises also allow us to extend our training capacity to support training of future doctors, something that the surgery has always supported as an established training practice. Both staff and patients are already benefiting from the new environment, and we have already received extremely positive feedback from patients who have attended the new practice.”
Dr Gareth Lloyd, Senior Partner, Whitchurch Road Surgery
“Since we have moved into the new building, we have started to run the UPCC (Unplanned Primary Care Clinic) clinic for our cluster, this will hopefully help to take the pressure of other surgeries as we will be seeing to new sore throat, coughs and other acute issues. We have also started hosting a mental health counsellor for the locality. From April this year, we will be hosting MSK (physiotherapy) and Spirometry clinic (COPD, Asthma). If we were still in our old building, none of this would be possible.”
Dr Gareth Lucocq. Practice Manager. Whitchurch Road Surgery
“We are very happy to be associated with this development, as it will provide excellent health facilities for the community and the remediated land will result in a significant net increase in the number of allotment plots that can be let to local residents.”
John Deering from Flaxland Avenue Allotments Society