This week we received the very sad news that my local GP of sixteen years and Clinical Chair of the NHS Swindon Clinical Commissioning Group Dr Peter Crouch passed away last Saturday.
Peter’s family are at the forefront of our thoughts as are his medical partner, Dr June Morris and his whole practise team.
I wanted to take this opportunity to express my deep sorrow and put on record how proud I am to have had the privilege of working with Peter over the course of the past six years. I don’t think I have met anybody who was as passionate about improving local health care provision and who was truly dedicated to his work. Peter would not stop until he got the desired outcome for patients across Swindon and as a result our town owes him a huge debt of gratitude.
Amongst his numerous achievements was playing a key role in ensuring that the formula for allocating Government funding for community health care gave Swindon a fairer deal. This has resulted in a staggering increase of tens of millions of pounds for local health services in Swindon.
Peter also led the campaign to secure a Radiotherapy Unit at the Great Western Hospital. Thanks to his persistence, enthusiasm and hard work, Peter would not let Robert Buckland and I rest until we had lobbied every single health Minister, the Secretary of State for Health and the Chief Executive of NHS England, to ensure that the Radiotherapy Centre was given the go ahead. I am so grateful that we were able to work with Peter on this and rely on his expert knowledge and meticulous work ethic.
In more recent months Peter worked tirelessly to get local GPs, representatives from NHS England and Robert and I round a table to make sure that Swindon got the support it deserved from other parts of our NHS. This resulted in extra funding being made available from NHS England to the Swindon CCG to produce a marketing video that is aimed at attracting more GPs to come and work in Swindon.
I could go on and on with praise for his achievements and dedication to healthcare in our town. I hope that in the days to come our community can honour his memory and ensure that his aims of improved primary and community care for Swindon residents are achieved. Both Robert and I will continue to honour his legacy by working hard to meet the extremely high ambitions that he rightly set for healthcare in our town.
