General practitioner chain Co-Med will file for bankruptcy next week. Lawyer George van Zijl confirmed this to NOS Reports from L1 News.

The GP chain has been in a sorry state for some time. It was announced last Tuesday that all health insurers had ended their collaboration, causing them to lose funding. Insurers believe the quality of care is substandard, partly because Co-Med has been unable to manage staffing levels in its 10 practices.

The Health and Young People’s Care Inspectorate considers that access to the chain is substandard and that emergency care is not properly organised. For example, doctors cannot be at a clinic within 15 minutes. Clinics have been closed “until further notice” since last week, meaning patients have to switch to other GPs. More than 50,000 people were patients at the Co-Med clinic.

“From the moment the health insurance companies’ decision to suspend their contracts was made public, things happened quickly,” says Van Ziegl. “It directly led to widespread sickness reporting by employees and the withdrawal of trust by the self-employed. That was the death knell.”

The lawyer says the speed of developments over the past two weeks in particular has “pushed Co-Med into the abyss,” and it is now filing for bankruptcy.

“It is unusual for such formal measures to be implemented in such a short period of time. Furthermore, there is a widespread problem when it comes to GP care. Whether or not dealing with Co-Med in this way is the solution is an answerable question. My client strongly disputes that the nature and extent of the shortcomings justify such action.”

The inspectorate ordered Co-Med this week to transfer patient files to alternative GPs. Director Guy Vroomin said in a response Thursday that it was difficult to simply transfer all the files, because not all patients had given permission to scan the files digitally. It is unclear how the file transfer will take place.