Letter: Walk-in clinics

Sir: It was a shame that your reporting on the new walk-in medical centres (Pop-in clinics named as GPs fight on", 17 July) concentrated on conflict between the BMA and the Government rather than the proposals themselves.

I am a GP Chair of a Primary Care Group in South London. We are delighted to have had our walk-in centre application approved.

We have developed a centre that will help us to resolve some of the critical health issues in our locality. It will help us to address the need for rapid access to emergency contraception 16 hours a day, 7 days a week. This will help us to reduce our alarming local rate of teenage pregnancy. The walk-in centre will allow us to offer an extensive nurse-led assessment centre for local residents with mental health problems. It will allow us to offload our local department of Accident and Emergency. It will offer a service to people who, because of work or family commitments, find it hard to access their GP.

Our walk-in centre will be integrated with our GP system and will help to reduce the workload of our busy GPs.

Dr TOM COFFEY

Balham Tooting and Wandsworth Primary Care Group

London SW18