Doctors have withdrawn their twilight service from a key hospital.
GPs operating in Girvan say they are no longer prepared to work out of hours at the town’s community facility.
It will leave the unit without local medics covering the overnight shift for the first time.
NHS chiefs will now be forced to cover shifts from the centrally operated Ayrshire Urgent Care Service (AUCS) based out of Crosshouse in Kilmarnock.
Critics fear it will leave patients in Girvan facing longer waits instead of tapping into locally available docs. Until now, the 20-inpatient bed hospital has been covered exclusively by GPs based in and around Girvan.
They have been able to offer quick responses to phone calls from nursing staff requesting urgent care on wards.
But in an internal document seen by the Ayrshire Post, “sustainability and workforce issues” have been blamed for the decision to cease the agreement.
Medics from the AUCS will now be asked to step in and provide wider ranging out of hours coverage along with other community hospitals on their rota.
Staff have been told it is “not a change in service model, it’s a change in personnel, and therefore there is no expected risk to delivery of safe patient care.”
But one Girvan patient warned: “This will absolutely place the people of Girvan at more risk and nobody can claim otherwise.
“The community hospital has been built on its access to local GPs down the years and their ability to see out of hours patients quickly. This cannot and will not be the case any longer under these changes.”
Girvan councillor, Alec Clark, is among those to have raised concerns over the move and said: “I’m aware of the situation and have raised the very real concerns of residents at a meeting of the Local Locality Planning group in Girvan.”
However, care chiefs this week denied the service would be compromised by the move.
Tim Eltringham, Director of the South Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership, said: “Following a review led by ourselves, the independent GPs notified the Board they were unable to continue to provide out of hours provision to the Community Hospital from December 15.
“Working alongside East Ayrshire Health and Social Care Partnership, the decision was made to re-align this out of hours provision under the remit of the Ayrshire Urgent Care Service (AUCS).
“AUCS is a well-established community service which provides out of hours clinical care and treatment to all patients across Ayrshire.
“AUCS clinicians provide virtual clinical assessments as well as seeing patients at home or at a primary care treatment centre.
“If a patient at Girvan Community Hospital needs to see a clinician during the out of hours period, triaging and visiting will be provided through
AUCS.
“We will work closely with AUCS and Girvan Community Hospital leadership teams to make sure we are working effectively together and continue to deliver a high-quality responsive service to our Girvan Community Hospital patients.”