DISTRESSED patients at a Wyre Forest doctor's surgery have threatened to 'top themselves' following the news that they can no longer get their medication from the practice.

NHS England are currently undertaking a validation of the dispensing patient list at Wolverley Surgery, resulting in 40 per cent of their 1,936 dispensing patients being struck from the books.

Surgery GP, Catherine Devenport, said the surgery had a duty of care to the patients in its locality, and part of that mean provided medication to those that needed it.

In a letter addressed to Martina Ellery, head of primary care NHS England, she said the validation exercise "has proved extremely distressing to a large number of elderly, vulnerable patients who you seem to have no regard for whatsoever. Indeed two patients have stated they would like to ‘top themselves’ following your decision to disallow them to continue as a dispensing patients.

"We have always been lead to believe that patient choice should be taken into account; your actions go against this and everything that the NHS stands for. You do not care what the consequences are for our patients or how much distress and difficulty this causes."

The validation process will see patients who live within 1.6km of a pharmacy be removed as a dispensing patient from the surgery, which has stood in the village for 53 years, unless they have 'serious difficulty' and meet certain criteria, which according to Ms Ellery, they have had the chance to prove.

She said: "Dispensing GP surgeries have regulations that they must adhere which mean that only patients who meet certain conditions are able to receive pharmaceutical services from their GP surgery or provider of primary medical services. The conditions include a requirement for the patients to live at a distance of more than 1.6km from any pharmacy premises (point to point). We have reviewed the dispensing patient lists for all our contractors and found some to have included a number of patients that live less than the required distance from the nearest pharmacy, which goes against the regulations.

"Practices should only be adding patients to the their dispensing list that do not meet the criteria.

"All patients that have been affected by these changes have been able to put in an application of ‘serious difficulty’. These were reviewed and the outcome of these applications have been communicated to patients. We are happy to consider further applications for the consideration of serious difficulty or review existing applications should new information be provided."

The surgery, which has been given until June to transition patients over, will be appealing the decision, despite patients and staff being advised that they can not appeal in a letter from NHS England informing them of the new regulations surgeries are to adhere to across the country.

For more information on the validation of dispensing patients procedure, visit england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/review-dispen-patient-lists-proced.pdf.