CINDERFORD’S overcrowded medical centre in Dockham Road is planning to move to a new site to cope with a rising population.

The current building, which houses two GP practices, the Dockham Road Surgery and Forest Health Care, badly needs to expand.

The Health Centre was purpose built in 1977 accommodating the practices plus ancillary services, including offices and consulting facilities.

However the surgeries’ growing patients lists have now outgrown the building and, with the population of the Forest of Dean predicted to rise by 5,000 by 2031, the situation is only expected to get worse.

Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) is now looking at a number of sites in the area where a new centre could be built to house both surgeries for the foreseeable future. It has not revealed the sites being investigated but one local landowner told the Forester that a plot of his land off Valley Road, Cinderford, served by the No 30 bus service, is being considered.

One option open to the group is to refurbish and extend the existing building, owned by NHS Propco, a government-owned limited company. Another option is to do nothing.

Judy Gazzard of the Cinderford Patients’ Practitioners Group said: “The doctors’ surgeries really do need to move because they have run out of room and cannot expand on that site. They are really squidged in.”