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06 Sept 2025
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06 Sept 2025
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Damian Doherty and Maeve O'Neill at Racecourse Medical practice.
The Western Trust will be the new temporary contractor ensuring GP services continue for almost the 5,000 patients and staff of Racecourse Medical Centre in the Shantallow area of the city.
The guarantee has been welcomed by People Before Profit Ballyarnett representative Damien Doherty, who said: "We fully agree with the Western Trust stepping in to make sure Racecourse Medical Centre GP services continue for the near 5000 patients and staff following the abrupt withdrawal of the Department of Health appointed contractor.
"The Department of Health needs to provide certainty and confidence that GP services for the area will remain permanently in place.
"We back calls for the DUP to end its cynical block on a functioning Stormont Executive. However, we do not forget that consecutive Stormont Executive's are responsible for the fragility and uncertainty facing GP services in Derry and across the North.
"Rhetoric aside, from the beginning of the Good Friday Agreement the main parties all agreed the public sector, including the health service, needed to be rundown to create space for the profit focused private sector."
Mr Doherty added that the private health sector was now booming with profits - sucked out of the health service.
He added: "This didn't happen accidentally. It happened because parties constituting the Executive made a priority of it. They put profit before people and the consequences are clear.
"Over and over we see manufactured health service crises exploited to reduce access and entrench health profiteering.
"People Before Profit's priority is defending access to a quality health service that's publicly funded and free at the point of use. This starts with local GP services.
"We will continue to back residents efforts utilising people power to demand the Department of Health make sure GP services in Shantallow and elsewhere remain locally accessible."
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