As a GP who has worked at the Halstead surgery for 29 years, I felt I should reply to last week’s article about the pressures on the surgery.

Your readers are probably aware that there is a shortage of doctors wanting to become GP’s throughout the country.

Like many other practices we are struggling to recruit new doctors.

The surgery has extra challenges of an above average elderly population and a large number of patients in residential & nursing homes, who require more of our time.

Over the past 20 years there has been a revolution in the way the NHS works with a much wider range of skills employed.

Just as GP’s are now doing many tasks traditionally carried out in hospitals, we now have specialist nurses, health care assistants, and paramedics assisting in primary care.

So whilst we continue to try and recruit new GP’s, we are also in the process of employing a wider range of health care professionals to ease the pressures.

In the future patients may not always see a FP, but depending on their problem will be cared for by other health care professionals.

I hope our patients will be understanding of the situation.

None of us enjoys working in a system under such pressure but all of our staff do their best to provide a good service with limited resources.

Dr John Markham The Elizabeth Courtauld Surgery, Halstead