Three doctors have to share a single tiny consulting room at Invergowrie Medical Practice and it is not big enough to hold all the equipment they need.
Dr Ronnie Ip and colleagues Alison Thomson and Mike Gray would like to provide a more comprehensive service to their list of patients, which has grown to more than 1,500, but they don’t have the space.
Yesterday Dr Ip demonstrated the problem by wheeling an electrocardiograph machine through from the patients’ clinic room to the consulting room.
“This machine ought to be in here all the time, but there’s nowhere to put it,” he said. “When I need it for a patient I have to leave my patient in the room, walk through to the clinic, knock on the door, hope the nurse who is in there isn’t with a patient and can answer, and then wheel it back to my consulting room.
“In here I can only really have my desk, some chairs, an examination bed and a few pieces of essential equipment. There’s much more that should be here, but there’s nowhere to put it.”
The consulting room is one of five small spaces in the cramped Errol Road surgery that the three GPs, local councillors and the wider community think is no longer fit for purpose. There is a waiting room, receptionist’s room, clinic and toilet.
Access to the surgery is reached up a rutted track that has to be shared with a block of flats, and parking space is at a premium.
Doctors Ip, Thomson and Gray divide their time between Invergowrie and the linked surgery at Ancrum Road in Dundee. Although they cover a rota and are never all at Invergowrie at the same time, they say their facilities in the village should be much bigger.
Their call for NHS Tayside to provide what other patients across the country receive has been strongly backed by Carse of Gowrie councillor Douglas Pover.
The doctors are frustrated at the lack of progress with various projects that were suggested in the past to meet their requirements, including a bigger site to the west and a move to the existing primary school building next door after it is replaced.
NHS Tayside’s associate medical director for primary care Dr Michelle Watts said: “We are aware of the current situation in Invergowrie regarding GP premises.
“We have been working with the practice and will continue to work with them around medium to long term sustainable options to meet the future needs of the Invergowrie and wider Carse of Gowrie population.”