LOCAL MSP Jamie Greene has lodged a motion with the Scottish Parliament raising concern over West Kilbride GP Surgery’s recent difficult in securing permanent GPs to meet its needs.

The West of Scotland list MSP outlined the ‘deep concern regarding the recent crisis’ at West Kilbride’s GP surgery, pointing out that the practice has struggled to find sufficient replacement GPs to meet the demands of the surgery, ‘which nearly led to its closure’.

He added that locums were eventually found that will keep the surgery open until at least Christmas 2017, but that this issue is far from resolved.

The Conservative politician also highlighted Audit Scotland’s recent report on hospital workforce planning, which noted that long-term GP shortages is an issue that Scotland will have to deal with and believes that this is a clear example of such mismanagement affecting local communities, and calls on the Scottish Government to take the appropriate steps to ensure that West Kilbride and other GP surgeries are ‘sufficiently staffed in the future to ensure that they can meet their patients’ demands.’

Mr Greene commented: “The SNP’s complete mismanagement of NHS workforce planning has led Scotland to a situation where we simply aren’t prepared for the current needs of local medical services.

“It’s questionable whether we will be able to meet growing demand. After years of being warned we are now seeing the very real impact of ignoring the warnings and failing to address to the very real issue of GP recruitment.

“This cannot be solved overnight, there is a significant time lag in training GPs.”