Tarvin's Future Health Care

As well as dealing with current issues, the Parish Council looks forward to try and assess the needs of the community in the future. The Parish is growing and there are bound to be pressures on the infrastructure and environment that impact on the lives of residents. It is part of the Parish Council's role to try and ensure that issues are addressed before they become problems.

As well as questioning the capacity of the physical infrastructure, the Parish Council has recently looked at the provision of health care, now and in the future. With the population due to both grow and age in the next few years, they have questioned if there is sufficient capacity in the parish to meet the medical needs of residents. A reply from NHS England on this topic was discussed on Monday evening.

The GP practice serving Tarvin has a total list of 7651 patients, though how many of these live in Tarvin is not given. The practice has 1913 patients for every Whole Time Equivalent (WTE) GP, more than the other Tarporley practice which has 1735 per WTE, though this difference was not regarded as significant. The Tarvin practice can also offer appointments in Waverton and Tarporley, though access to these may be difficult for some people with mobility problems or lack of transport.

The hours a surgery opens are for the GP practice itself to decide and are outside the control of NHS England, as long as the contractual hours of patient access from 8.00am to 6.30pm during weekdays are covered. It was suggested that the way to take up issues of access to services was to contact the practice's Patient Participation Group which was the preferred route for the discussion of such issues.

The Parish Council decided to contact the Tarvin practice to start discussions and hope that a constructive dialogue can begin.