As long-time residents of Wanniassa, the accessibility of our family doctor has always been one of the many delights of living in the Tuggeranong Valley.

The relocation of its doctors to Phillip will not only remove a vital community facility of many years, but will cause considerable inconvenience to the majority of the population in the area, including the aged.

The Phillip location is not suitable for bus travellers and, for those who do drive, parking is, at best, at a premium, if not non-existent.

The closure will also have a significant effect on the other businesses in the Wanniassa shopping precinct.

I note that the Primary Health Care Group does not have the balls to provide an email address on their web site for concerned residents to register their discontent online.

Their only options are to telephone or send a letter.

I also note that the group was founded by a doctor.

What a shame this person and other principals of the organisation don't show the same concern for patients as they do for the contents of their wallets.

Ross Caddy, Wanniassa

It is a shame that our ACT Government has opted to do nothing to prevent seven medical practitioners moving from the Wanniassa shopping centre to the semi-industrial area of Phillip.

This move by the Wanniassa medical team will not only place more pressure and workload on the remaining Tuggeranong medical centres but it will also create more traffic and parking chaos in the Phillip complex.

This means that shop owners and businesses in the Phillip area will also suffer, from lack of customer parking space, along with the patients who attended the Wanniassa medical centre.

While it is not an ideal situation to have your medical practitioner do a moonlight flit and leave town, there is a solution.

For example, there is nothing stopping the ACT Government from intervening and placing this major shift, in the health and welfare of the Tuggeranong residents on, on hold.

The ACT Government could stop the medical practitioners from relocating to Phillip until replacement doctors are available, a dedicated bus service between Wanniassa to Phillip is organised and a new car park at the Phillip medical centre is constructed.

Doing a moonlight flit is not a healthy thing to do when people's health and welfare are at stake.

David Cavill, Kambah

We are being marched unthinkingly down the path of extreme privatisation of services, with each new step barely raising an eyebrow.

The closure of a large 'chain' medical practice in Tuggeranong as a business decision only hints at the disheartening and destructive consequences that lie ahead.

Government offices in Canberra already have entire floors usually lower floors of 'second class servants' working under diminished circumstances for major administrative services companies.

Overworked, crowded, under transient and questionable management, and with recycled office fittings: harbingers of more to come.

Without a word of irony, we read some weeks ago in The Canberra Times that some operational ships of the Australian Navy may be arranged as contracted services! We already know about the prisons and detention centres run by contractors.

That standards and conditions tend to fall is a necessary correlate.

The services are provided as a vehicle for extracting profit. We are poorer, not just because money is being siphoned-off to vested interests, but also by the abandonment of vocation as a principle in service provision.

Ross Kelly, Monash