Doctors finally move into Vale Drive clinic

8:10am Saturday 29th March 2008

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A £5 million 'superclinic' in Barnet is to start offering GP services from next month - two and a half years after it opened.

Vale Drive Primary Care Centre, in Vale Drive, opened in October 2005 and already provides speech and language therapy, services for young people with special needs, family planning, paediatric and podiatry and foot health services.

GPs were meant to have moved in when it opened, but the stumbling block in attracting doctors to the clinic is believed to be an insufficient number of parking spaces.

Husband and wife GP team, Don and Nalini Ranasinghe, who manage Church House Surgery, in Church Passage, Wood Street, Barnet, and have around 3,000 patients on their books, will officially move into the health centre on April 1.

The centre was set up in conjunction with Barnet Primary Care Trust (PCT) and Elevate Partnerships Ltd, as part of a nationwide initiative to provide modern and innovative facilities.

Mrs Ranasinghe said: "Our reason for moving is we don't have enough space to satisfy patients' needs. I hope it will improve the quality of services provided."

Alison Blair, Barnet PCT's director of primary care and deputy chief executive, said: "We are very pleased GPs are now moving into Vale Drive.

"This increases the number of services available for patients on the same site.

"The move into the Vale Drive Primary Care Centre has taken longer to organise than we would have liked."