New £50,000 clinical training suite for Alnwick Medical Group coming after funding from Newcastle University

The state-of-the-art suite will be used for all clinical training at the practice but could also be made available for the training needs of other local businesses.

The news was revealed by Tony Brown, managing partner at Alnwick Medical Group, at a meeting of Alnwick Town Council on Thursday.

“The issue we’ve got in Alnwick is that you’re always dragging people up from down south,” he said. “We’re trying to tempt people away from the hospitals and major employers down there so we need to look at how we can grow our own and how we can get people working and training in Alnwick.

“To that end, Newcastle University have given us £50,000 to develop a new training suite at the practice. I am going to use that for all of our clinical training. I want to have a state-of-the-art training facility in there.

“When it’s not being used by us I want to make sure it could be used for other training, maybe by some of the other businesses in town.”

Meanwhile, two more of its advance nurse practitioners can now prescribe, meaning the whole secondary care team now has the ability, which frees up GPs for other duties.

In addition, Dr Rachel Taylor can now teach GP registrars – a role missing from Alnwick since the retirement of Dr Gary Fraser, Dr Chris Stephenson and Dr Dave Davidson.