With its undulating hills and rural charm, many of us would dream of working in the Lake District village of Coniston. But not, it seems, if you are a GP.
After 170 years with a dedicated family doctor, Coniston faces losing its health practice after failing to attract a single GP to the area.
The village of about 800 people launched a search for a practitioner nearly a year ago when its present doctor retired. Yet despite an advertising campaign to promote the area – boasting, among other things, seven pubs “so we’ll never run out of beer” – no one came forward.
Tim Farron, the Liberal Democrat MP for Westmorland and Furness, said it would be a “tragedy” to lose the village GP service for the first time since the 1850s. He said NHS leaders had “dragged [their] feet for months despite the community clamouring for action”.
Farron added: “Small surgeries like this just have to exist because they cover vast rural areas and an elderly population and we’re not tolerating it closing. Once you lose this you lose it for good, and it’s all part and parcel of the atrophying of rural communities. It’s a move that just leads to substantial Lake District villages becoming ghost towns.”
Coniston is the latest victim of a chronic shortage of GPs nationwide after years of underinvestment and an ageing population with increasingly complex illness.
Health leaders warned in November that the safety of millions of patients was being put at risk as surgeries were unable to recruit new doctors, leading to many managing “unsustainable” workloads and approximately 2,200 patients each.
One in three GPs now choose to work in private practices – like the Coniston surgery – rather than for the NHS in a trend that has exacerbated the primary care crisis in the health service.
In Coniston, it will mean the village’s mostly elderly patients will have an hour round trip by car to the nearest full-time surgery in Ulverston. Travelling by bus would take about two hours and include an almost half-hour walk. Nearly one in three of the parish residents are over 65, according to the latest census, while about one in seven are disabled.
Nestled around miles of fells at the head of Coniston Water, the fifth biggest lake in the Lake District, an influx of holidaymakers means the village’s population quadruples in the summer months. In a promotional video, residents tried to entice potential GPs with its array of pubs and a brewery, its mountains, lake and schools, adding: “We’re a friendly bunch, bud.”
The Coniston patient group, which has fought for more than a decade to keep the surgery open, said: “We will not accept the loss of our GP service without a renewed and determined effort to find a provider. We have demonstrated overwhelming local support and a clear clinical need.”
The NHS Lancashire and South Cumbria integrated care board said the surgery would be run by an interim GP until a permanent solution was found. The contract to run the surgery was out to tender for more than six weeks, it said, but there had been no bids.
