Practice Merger And New Ways of Accessing Us Online

A GP partnership is a group of GPs (and sometimes non-GP) partners who come together in a partnership to run a GP practice. The partners are ultimately responsible for the running of the practice, employing the staff and the services provided. NHS England has contracts with GP partnerships for the delivery of primary care services. The services delivered under these contracts are referred to GP practices. GP practices are operated by the GP partnerships and their teams from GP surgeries. GP surgeries are the buildings we operate from.

• Victor Street is a well-established GP practice which has proudly served communities around Shirely and the western part of Southampton for many years. Victor Street has one surgery site, which is next to Sainsburys in Shirley and the practice serves around 11000 patients. Victor Street has a team of GPs, Practice Nurses, an Advanced Practitioner, Pharmacists, Social Prescribing Link workers, Receptionists, Administrators and more.
• St Marys is a larger GP practice serving around 22000 patients living in the central parts of Southampton. St Marys main site is at St Marys Surgery in the inner city. St Marys also has two branch sites at Telephone House in the city centre and Mulberry Surgery in Portswood, next to Sainsburys. St Marys has served Southampton’s inner city communities for many years. In 2023 St Marys merged with Mulberry House surgery to become a bigger single practice.

The St Marys and Victor Street practices have merged. This is largely a technical thing and will mean that the two practices will come together as one service, running from our four surgery sites.
We will also start to offer our patients the opportunity to submit online requests for appointments and other support. This service is available via our contact us online page and will be open from 8am till 6.30pm, Monday to Friday (except Bank Holidays). You can submit online requests via this service for appointments, information and other services.

Generally, once you submit a request we will get back to you to offer you the best response to meet your needs. This could be an appointment with a member of our team, or information and advice or signposting to another local service best suited to meet your needs.

You shouldn’t notice much (if anything) when the practices merge. Hopefully any changes you do experience going forward will be an improvement. You may notice that some of the texts or letters you receive from us say Southampton Sea City Partnership instead of St Marys or Victor Street Surgery.

No

Generally speaking, we will know which patients were previously registered with St Marys, Mulberry or Victor Street. You will have a named GP, based at your preferred local surgery site who will oversee your care. Patients who usually have appointments at Mulberry (for example) will wherever possible continue to be offered appointments there. If a patient who was previously registered at Mulberry would like to have an appointment at St Marys, Victor Street or Telephone House, then we may be able to accommodate this.

From our experience of merging St Marys and Mulberry surgeries last year, we have found that some patients don’t mind having an appointment at a different site – if it means they can be seen sooner.
In the future we may develop new more specialist services (e.g. physiotherapy or mental health services) and might sometimes offer these from one of our four sites.

No. We have no plans to close any of the surgery sites.

As above we will know which patients have traditionally used Mulberry, Victor Steet or St Marys by their postcode. We will also be able to see in patients records who their usual named GP or nurse is. We will try to ensure that people can access “continuity of care”, which means seeing a clinician that you know, at a site local to where you live. This is particularly important for people with more complex or ongoing health issues. Evidence suggests that for people with more complex needs, continuity of care is better for patient health outcomes and also for the clinicians involved. For some people who need to access quick advice for a simple problem, we have found that speed of appointment is sometimes more important than seeing a particular clinician. We will try to develop our services with the right balance of “continuity of care” for those who need it and improved access for everyone.

We will not be making any sudden changes to the way you receive care or access services. As mentioned on this page, we have instroduced a new way to contact us online via Anima as a way of accessing our services. This will give you more choice and options about how you access care. You will still be able to call us or pop into one of our surgery sites when we are open.

Over time we will be looking to improve the way we offer services from all of our surgeries. This might mean that you have a different experience to how you access services now – but in all cases we will only be looking to improve patient care and experience by these changes. When we are making bigger changes, we will ensure that we involve our patients, the public and our staff in our planning.

No, if anything, being a bit bigger will enable us to offer a wider range of service across wider opening hours