09/01/2026
Hi everyone, as you are all aware Dr Clegg is leaving this month. We have a letter from Dr Spruce that he would like to share with you about the upcoming months. Thank you for all of your support with this.
Jan 2026, from the Desk of Dr Spruce
Dear Cradley patients,
Happy New Year.
Many of you will be aware that Dr Clegg will soon be moving overseas to start a new life with his family. We wish him all the very best with this exciting new adventure. He has worked tirelessly over the last few years and the surgery has benefited hugely from his sense of energy and innovation. He will be very sadly missed but we are grateful for all that has done.
We are excited to announce that Dr Hina Wajid will be returning to the surgery as a salaried GP to support me with the patient list.
Dr Hina has worked for a considerable time at the surgery before in a training position and we were absolutely delighted when she passed her exams and was keen to accept a role here with us. She is an excellent clinician and fits in really well with the team at the Surgery.
The latter part of January and February will represent a period of change at the surgery and we would ask patients to bear with us while new staff bed in and we “tweak” the appointments and plans.
We are as ever committed to the best care possible but there are some services which may be less available until March time.
We anticipate routine appointments with myself may not be possible in the short term. There may be delays for non- Core GP work such as, HGV/DVLA medicals. Joint injections, Shotgun licenses, fostering medicals etc. We will always strive to do as much additional work as we can, but we thought it was prudent to be honest and explain the challenges we may face. We can obviously refer patients to other avenues for certain things if needed.
We would ask for your patience and support with this please as we can continue to work with you to build a resilient, supportive service that will be with you for years to come.
We hope and expect any disruption to be short term, but it is of course important we protect core services at this time and that we ask you to support all of the team at Cradley to continue to offer the best level of care we can with the resources we have.
I will end on a personal plea from me, with the pressure on appointments for all members of the team please, please can I reiterate again how important it is to cancel your appointments if you no longer need them. In December alone we had 40 appointments booked that were not attended. This is at one of the busiest times of year and equates to around 8 appointments a week.
Kind regards,
Dr Chris Spruce
