West Bar Doctors Surgery

About

General Practice based in Banbury.

Story

1872 West Bar Surgery started when Dr Arthur Boissier practised from Shrublands, No 3 West Bar Street, which is the red brick house by the DVSA Test Centre. He lived in the entire house, and had a tiny annexe in which he saw patients. He had a groom and a gardener who had cottages in the garden, and stables for his horses and his trap.

Dr Arthur Bossier was a single handed GP and Bloxham School medical officer, many of his visits were done on horseback, or by horse and trap. One of his relatives, the Rev. Frederick Scobell Boissier, was the second Headmaster of Bloxham School from 1886-1898, and so there is a very long connection between West Bar Surgery and Bloxham School.

The social life in Banbury at the time the practice was initiated was mid-Victorian. As the practice grew all the formalities were observed, as far as the medical profession was concerned, e.g. a junior partner’s wife was expected to call on the senior partner’s wife and leave a card, with the normal custom of turning the corner down to indicate that she was a new arrival; the senior wife would then visit her or invite her to tea.

Sunday was still a Victorian Sabbath, this being a town with a very strong Quaker tradition and consequently the social life of Banbury was really fairly strict. On market day the country folk used to come into town, a lot of them with their produce, usually on privately owned buses which were based in their villages.

1967 the bulldozers moved into Shrublands, what was then the back garden to No 3 West Bar Street, it was time to move out. That marked the end of an era in which the Junior Partner was expected to live in the flat over the practice premises.
A new state of the art West Bar Surgery was built in the garden of the old practice, and conveniently took the unused number, 1 West Bar, it was the pride and joy of the senior partners who had helped designed and create it.

When the building was opened it was felt that they had moved into an enormous palace.
But by the early 1970's they were beginning to feel that there were certain areas where they had under-estimated their needs.

1983 By this time space was getting a bit tight so a second new extension was added to 1 West Bar, the opening of new extension was on Monday 5th July 1983.

2009 West Bar Surgery moved to South Bar House, Oxford Road, following two years of planning. After many achievements, building and maintaining a fantastic team and moving the surgery to South Bar House.

The practice is now sited slightly to the west of the town centre and there is a branch surgery within 2 miles of the main surgery. We have around 17,000 registered patients and our Primary Health Care Team consists of 75+ people.

We have a tradition of innovation in many aspects of general practice. Such innovation has spanned the development of practice premises, information systems, health service organisation, operational research, and the postgraduate education of doctors and nurses.

Our aspiration is to deliver the values of traditional family practice whilst using modern technology, custom designed premises and an integrated primary health care team to
ensure that the clinical standard of that care is high.
West Bar Surgery is a training practice. This means doctors training to enter general practice spend up to a year with us in order to gain the experience and skills they need to become family doctors.