People in the beautiful Cornish town of Lostwithiel have turned to song in a desperate effort to recruit a new doctor.
More than 500 people, young and old (some musically gifted, others not) have appeared in a pop video urging a GP to join a local practice.
Despite the town’s beauty and history – it is an ancient capital of Kernow – the town has had a difficult time enticing a new GP.
So a wide range of townsfolk, from butchers to firefighters, schoolchildren to pharmacists, danced along to the local choir singing, rather plaintively, lines such as: “We’ve folks with asthma and young new mothers / We’ve limping fathers and snot-filled others.”
The song and film highlight some of the town’s attractions, including the River Fowey, a castle, a fine fish and chip shop, and a mainline railway station. It concludes pithily: “You can negotiate your terms / If you keep us free from germs.”
Emma Mansfield, a spokesperson for Really Lovely Projects, the arts-led community interest company that made the video, said: “Our local GP contacted us and said he’d been trying to recruit for a new doctor but was having no luck and felt he had to do something quite radical.
“Everywhere is finding it hard to find GPs at the moment, and we want an outstanding doctor who’s going to really stay here for 20 years. Everybody came out and took part. It’s all locally made, a local musician did the backing track and the local choir sang it.”
The song – set loosely to the tune of Nina Simone’s Ain’t Got No, I Got Life – and video are part of the Lostwithiel Needs a Doctor campaign, which was launched by Dr Justin Hendriksz, the remaining practice partner at the surgery.
He said: “Despite the beauty of rural Cornwall and the lively, positive community of Lostwithiel, as a medical practice we have struggled to recruit new GPs through the usual route of adverts in the medical publications.
“We’re all very aware of the alarming number of GPs leaving the sector, so we know we’re not the only practice to be finding it such a challenge to find the right incoming doctors. Of course I’m biased, but there really is nowhere better to be a GP.”
He said local people had embraced the chance to do some recruiting via the power of song. “The whole community has got behind this idea and I sincerely hope the campaign pop song and video reaches the right people to come and find their ultimate job and home right here in Lostwithiel.”
