A grandmother behind legal action to save a threatened doctor’s surgery has insisted the campaign to save the facility will be triumphant.
Yvonne De Burgo, who is seeking a judicial review into the closure of Witney’s Deer Park Medical Centre, said she is fighting the battle on behalf of the town’s community.
The 71-year-old applied for the review, alleging a mishandling of the closure by Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group, in the hope it will halt, at least temporarily, the closure of the surgery.
Mrs De Burgo, who has been a patient at the medical centre for eight years, has frequent appointments due to a number of health issues including polycythemia (an abnormally high concentration of red blood cells) and type 2 diabetes.
She said: “The CCG didn’t consult with patients on its plans for the closure. They didn’t do it correctly.
“We went to a meeting with the CCG after it came out and they talked about us like we were numbers. I felt like something on a shelf that they wanted to move from one place to another.
“But they didn’t realise we have a fighting spirit and brains. We are now fighting for it and we are going to win.”
As it currently stands, the 4,400 patients registered at the centre will have to find an alternative surgery by March next year.
Oxfordshire CCG said it had been forced to close it because, when it put the service out to tender, no one came forward with a business plan that met its standards. The surgery had been run by Virgin Care.
Mrs De Burgo, who lives on the Deer Park estate, said that she and fellow members of the surgery’s Patient Participation Group, were told by Virgin on September 13 that the surgery going to close.
She said: “It was totally wrong. The CCG are supposed to consult with patients. It made me feel sick.
“Some of the PPG ladies who were at the meeting just burst into tears. None of us could believe it, it was just so out of the blue.
“Since then we’ve had to really get our skates on to get things done to stop this happening.”
Following discussions with solicitors, members of the PPG became confident they had a case against the CCG and Mrs De Burgo entered the application last month.
She said there are 16 separate accusations of error on the part of the CCG noted in the application. The case is live, but a hearing has not yet been scheduled.
Spokesman for the CCG Julia Stackhouse said: “The CCG has received documents from the solicitors acting for a patient of Deer Park Medical Centre.
“The CCG is unable to comment further pending legal discussions.”
