Just last month local residents in Kemp Town received a mailing from our Conservative MP Simon Kirby which loudly proclaimed that the threatened Eaton Place Surgery had been ‘saved’ from closure, thanks in large part to his own intervention.

Many patients were relieved that they did not now face the difficult task of finding another GP practice that had space to register them. Some even cancelled their new place at another surgery believing that their old one was staying open.

Yet now we hear from NHS England that talks on opening a new surgery on the same site never got beyond the preliminary stages.

Eaton Place GP surgery will close at the end of February, with no hope of a replacement on the horizon.

There are 3,000 patients who have not yet secured a GP, many of them vulnerable and elderly.

It is now inevitable that many of these displaced patients will turn to the nearest NHS facility, the overstretched A&E department at the Royal Sussex Hospital.

For so many residents to be left without a family doctor, all because a Tory MP rushed to claim credit for something that was never a done deal in the first place is shameful.

I trust Simon Kirby shall be issuing an apology to the residents.

Mark Laverick, Paston Place, Brighton