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At least 1.3 million patients have been forced to find a new GP in the past five years after their surgeries closed due to Tory austerity.

Relocations surged as hundreds of practices merged or closed amid staffing and financial problems.

The number of GPs per head of population has fallen for each of the last four years amid pay cuts and rising workloads.

Prof Helen Stokes-Lampard, chairwoman of the Royal College of GPs, said closures due to the exodus of family doctors show “a serious failure of the system”.

Dr Richard Vautrey, chairman of the British Medical Association GP Committee, warned: “The recruitment and retention crisis is impacting practices of all sizes.

(Image: PA)

“Doctors face the pressures of rising workload, increasing administrative burden and a lack of resources.”

Last year 458,000 patients had to move on as 134 surgeries shut.

The year before 136 closures hit 410,000 patients, according to data released to GP magazine Pulse under the Freedom of Information Act.

Shadow Health Secretary Jonathan Ashworth said: “This exposes the real crisis in primary care after eight years of grinding Tory austerity.”

It comes after the Mirror revealed almost 4,000 GPs – nearly one in 10 – retired early in the past five years.

There are 1,000 fewer GPs in England since Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt’s 2015 election pledge to bring in 5,000 more by 2020, official data shows.

Patients wait an average of 13 days for a GP visit, up from 10 in 2015.

NHS England said it had invested £27million in 3,000 GP practices in the past two years with plans to help hundreds more this year, with an extra £2.4billion going into general practice each year by 2021.

"I lost my family doctor & now it’s just clinical"

Connie Scott had a trusted GP surgery five minutes from home that she had used for over 60 years until it closed this month.

Now the 89-year-old has a 40-minute round trip on four buses to her GP.

In a video plea to save Osler House surgery in Harlow, Essex, she said: “This has always been our surgery and I feel they’ve sold us out. It’s an absolute disgrace what they’ve done to us.”

The first she and the surgery’s 3,300 other patients knew about the closure was a letter informing them it was to shut within weeks.

The great-grandmother signed up as a patient at Osler House when it first opened in 1955.

She said: “The family doctor knew all my girls’ names and would ask after them.

“There was such a community feel about the place but now there is such a huge turnover these days they don’t have time to get to know you.”