Please reply to Dr Lisa Silver at lisasilver@nhs.net

I have responded to the S Oxon plan on a couple of occasions  purely from the perspective of a village doctor but also as one of the SE locality doctors which includes the 10 GP practices in SE Oxon.

The population rise expected due to housing expansion in SE Oxon is 17,050 homes to be built between 2016 and 2033, a population rise of 47,000 people.

This is the equivalent of 7 new GP surgeries in SE Oxon (average surgeries have approx. 7000 patients).

Due to a lack of national workforce planning we find ourselves in a position where very few doctors are choosing to become GP partners. There is an expected shortfall of 11.2 GPs in the locality in the next 4 years. More than 50% of qualifying GPs do locum work ie they are not attached to any one surgery. Approx 25% become salaried GPs and only about 25% become GP partners – these are the GPs that bed down in a practice and usually stay for a considerable time.

If we focus on Nettlebed practice and the villages it serves, the list size of 3454 patients ( stable for more than a decade) and served by Dr Barton and Dr Silver with a salaried GP, Dr Clitherow, has risen by 13.4% since 1.1.15 to todays list size of 3919.  This has arisen because of pressure of appointments on the Henley GP practices due to housebuilding in their area and their inability to recruit doctors over a period of a year. We have had to take on at least 400 patients who would otherwise have been registered in Henley but have chosen to leave the Henley practices and register with us because of perceived easier access.

The list size continues to rise inexorably.

Each man woman and child, on average consults 8x per annum and as such the list size rise means that the surgery has to find another 3712 appointments per annum.

The number of houses  proposed for Nettlebed is small but outside of Nettlebed it is proposed that 3000 homes are built on the Chalgrove airfield, which will overwhelm the Watlington and Chalgrove practices and there will be a big push of patients registered in Watlington coming up to us.

This is a precarious position as there is a national shortage of GPs, so much so that the govt is putting £100 m into agencies to try and recruit from abroad.

In summary, having read the S Oxon plan I can see nothing that details how the very considerable number of homes to be built across the area are to be serviced with medical facilities or indeed where the clinicians are going to come from to work in them.

Dr Lisa Silver 01491 641473