To All Our Patients
It is with great regret we have taken the decision to permanently close Newtongrange clinic. This was opened in 2018 following the conversion of the old health visiting building. It has been used since to offer GP, physio and nursing clinics. It was not proving as popular as our main site at Newbattle due to the lack of any parking but ideally we would have continued to use it to offer more clinical space and easier access for those in Newtongrange village.
However, due to major cost increases announced by NHS Lothian to service the building we have had no option but to close to protect our clinical service. As it is an NHS owned building the GP Partnership has to accept NHS Lothian’s Estate Services for cleaning, maintenance and utilities. They proposed increasing the costs onto the GP Partnership by over 330%! This forced us to make the difficult choice between keeping the building or reducing our staffing. As you are aware we are a very busy Practice so reducing our staffing is something we will never look to do as it would have a detrimental impact on the care we can provide. We understand this will be disappointing to patients, especially those within Newtongrange but we hope you can understand our decision.
With significantly more buildings planned in the area it is hugely frustrating we are being forced to reduce our premises but until the funding into General Practice and the NHS in general improves we fear more reductions like this are inevitable. We will strive to protect services for you all as best we can and hope that better times are to come. Many thanks for your understanding.
Kind regards,
Newbattle Medical Group
