TWO AIREBOROUGH GP practices have announced they are planning to merge.

Yeadon Tarn Medical Practice and Rawdon Surgery are taking the step in order to improve primary care and to ensure viability for the future.

The two surgeries will become one practice, with seven GP partners. They will keep their current buildings, and patients will retain the same named GP while being able to access additional services at either of the two sites.

Doctors say the decision has been taken after careful consideration to help ensure consistent high quality care.

Dr Adrian Rees, from Yeadon Tarn Medical Practice said: “This is a positive move and one we feel is right to ensure future viability and to protect and enhance patient services.

“Yeadon Tarn Medical Practice has recently had two partners reach retirement age and Rawdon Surgery has one partner retiring early next year. We chose to take this opportunity to make both practices stronger, successful and viable for primary care in the coming decades.

“One united practice will allow us to attract and retain new talent, across both clinical and support staff. More GP’s will afford us multiple benefits including the reduction of locum doctors, increased continuity of care, less administration for each partner and as a result an increase in GP appointments. This will also include increased out of hours and urgent care capacity.”

Dr Elaine James, also from Yeadon Tarn Medical Practice added: “Sharing staff expertise and best practice across all functions with greater training and career development will provide us with multiple opportunities to work at scale. In particular it will allow us to support GP’s special interests and in turn provide more in depth specialist health services such as palliative care, diabetes, care of the elderly and urgent care.”

Dr Laura Clegg, from Rawdon surgery said: “We care about the services that we offer to patients and believe that by bringing the two practices together we will demonstrate our values and behaviours of caring, respectfulness and efficiency in the delivery of service improvement for all our patients. We know from experience that both the practices involved have like-minded values and share the same ethos and vision for patient services.”

Dr Chris Mills, also from Rawdon surgery added: “The national direction of primary care is changing. There are ambitious plans in the NHS to have a wider range of services than is currently the case, delivered at scale in primary care settings. This merger will enable the practices to develop a more sustainable future both clinically and financially, investing in new staff, facilities and equipment for our patients.”

Subject to patient and staff engagement and regulatory approvals, it is expected that the merge will be finalised by April 2019.