I have written quite a bit about this with articles on blogs in my e-magazine Hethersett Herald and in the local media (The Eastern Daily Press and Norwich Evening News newspapers).
My latest article was featured in yesterday's newspapers and was given extensive coverage of a full page. I hope that in some small ways this helps the cause.
The problem is as our parish chair Adrienne Quinlan said "we are in a cleft stick."
In other words the existing surgery is not large enough to cater for an ever expanding population, but a second surgery or a completely new one would be hugely costly but is absolutely necessary. The current surgery is, in their own words, bursting and in a crisis and won't be able to cope with the village expansion.
But the existing surgery cannot afford to finance a new one, particularly in the light of clinicians suffering from burnout and sickness from trying to juggle so many balls at once. So that puts the ball firmly in the court of the developers and NHS England.
To my mind the Government has forged ahead with its building programmes with little or no thought about the consequences or improving infra-structure. Putting hundreds (and at times thousands) of new homes in a village or town is going to put a monumental strain on existing services. It really doesn't need a genius to see that.
But all too often services are an after thought. And please don't tell me that developers care about what they leave behind. They may pay lip service to facilities while they are in the process of building but once they have built and moved on that becomes someone else's problem.
The infrastructure needs to be in place before development takes place and before we blindly hurtle towards increased populations. But I'm not so naive as to think that will ever happen.
So what we have here, and I'm sure it's something replicated throughout our country, is a large building project without any or at least very little planning for the problems that this will cause.
Now I'm not saying that new people coming into the village shouldn't be welcomed. After all I was a newcomer myself over 40 years ago. What I am saying is that there has to be plans to support these people and selling them homes only for them to find out that they cannot sign on at their local surgery, or their local dentist etc is just not acceptable in any way, shape or form.
Hethersett Surgery cannot go on as it is at present. They and the village have made that quite plain. So what is the solution? There have been meetings between councillors, clinicians, developers and the medical services but as one councillor admitted at this week's parish council meeting "we seem to be going round in circles."
How many times have people been to meetings about new development only to come away feeling that no progress has been made? But this feeling cannot go on. Something quite obviously has to be done and it is up to the developers, the health secretary and NHS England to find a solution that isn't just plugging a gap prior to breaking out again in the future.
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I used the phrase cleft stick above. I know roughly what it means but had no idea how it came about. So back to research-mode.
To be in a cleft stick technically means a person or organisation are in a difficult situation which will bring problems whatever they decide to do. To my mind it's very similar to being in a Catch 22 situation. In this case Hethersett Surgery and residents know that we must have a new surgery but NHS England are refusing to sanction one. So I suspect we will continue to go round and round in (to quote one of my favourite programmes of all time) ever decreasing circles.
A cleft stick (and as a journalist I should have known this) was a device used by runners in the pre-telegraph days to carry messages, letters and news. It was often carried by journalists. There are other meanings of cleft stick but I feel I have waffled on long enough for one day.