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09
Apr
Harrogate GP practices merge to create town's second-largest surgery
Two years of work culminated this month in the merger of two Harrogate medical practices.
East Parade Surgery and Park Parade Surgery, both in Mowbray Square Medical Centre, have joined forces to become Strayside Health.
The merger was officially completed on April 1, but the ribbon was cut today by Harrogate and Knaresborough MP Tom Gordon at a ceremony in the second-floor surgery attended by about 40 members of staff and patients.
Dr Sarah Craven told the Stray Ferret:
It’s taken two years to get to this point and it’s involved a huge amount of work. Every single process has been reviewed and we’ve now completed the merger of all our systems and processes.
The NHS throws huge challenges at us all the time, and we try to run a quality service on limited resources. This merger will mean we’re pooling our budgets, and it should help to increase our resilience, so we can cope with any setbacks as a larger team. It feels like the right thing to be doing.
Mowbray Square Medical Centre.
The two practices have worked closely since moving into Mowbray Square in 2009, and for the last few years have shared their back office staff, including medical secretaries, clinical administration and data quality teams. Since 2021, they have also shared a nurse team.
The merger completes the process, with the unification of the patient services team, GP team and senior leadership team.
Practice manager Emma Keating said:
We have explored merging in the past, but it never quite got off the ground, due to various reasons. Due to the changing landscape in primary care, we feel that merging is going to give us the much-needed resilience to continue to provide high-quality primary care to our patients.
The merger brings the number of medical practices in the town down to six, and is the latest development in a national trend towards consolidation that has been apparent for well over a decade.
Today's ceremony coincided with news that a GP surgery in Ripon has been taken over by Harrogate and District NHS Foundation Trust.
Strayside Health occupies the second floor of Mowbray Square Medical Centre.
Strayside shares Mowbray Square Medical Centre with the Spa Surgery, which itself was formed in 2006 from the merger of the Alexandra Road Practice and Station Parade Surgery.
Mr Gordon said:
GP surgeries across the country are looking at ways they can better utilise their resources, and I think it makes sense to collaborate where people can and look to pool resources across the board.
What we’re hearing is that it will make it easier and more streamlined, with simplified processes rather than multiple different ones, and I think that’s only going to be good for patients’ experience.
Strayside has 15 GPs, six partners, two managers, three nurses, two healthcare assistants and a pharmacy team of five, as well as physiotherapists, social prescribers and mental health practitioners.
It is now Harrogate’s second-largest practice, with 16,000 patients. Only Moss Healthcare is larger, with around 20,000.
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