A councillor claims Medway's poor reputation is putting resident's lives at risk.

Cllr Howard Doe (Con) says the "old-fashioned" views of The Towns are putting doctors off from moving to the area.

At the Medway health and wellbeing board meeting, he said: "We've had problems with education and perception about the area.

"We are doing a tremendous amount of work as a council in promoting Medway.

"I wonder whether we can get some of that spin off into the recruitment of doctors, they might realise that the old-fashioned views of the area are out of date."

He quizzed representatives from the NHS why there is such a shortage of medical professionals in the primary care such as nurses, doctors and pharmacists.

This outburst came after Cllr Rupert Turpin (Con) raised the fact residents see this shortage as "an election issue".

He said: "Parts of Kent have the lowest rate of GP representation in the whole country.

"Some places it is twice as difficult and there are twice as many patients compared to an area like Liverpool.

"This is unacceptable and all of us here have experienced times where you can't get an appointment in four weeks.

"Out there people are saying there's a crisis for GPs so much so it's becoming an election issue even though we are only indirectly involved."

Medway Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG)'s chief operating officer, Stuart Jeffery, told councillors how walk-in centres that see around 100 patients per day are being "bolstered".

He added GP surgeries are looking to hire more temporary Locuum doctors to fill the gaps so residents can get appointments.

Caroline Rickard from the Kent Local Medical Committee said: "We know there is a recruitment and retention issue generally among GPs.

"It is a countrywide problem but it's not just limited to GPs it's the wider primary care model workforce as well.

"We are doing a tremendous amount of work promoting Medway... I wonder whether we can get some of that spin off into the recruitment of doctors, they might realise that the old-fashioned views of the area are out of date" - Cllr Howard Doe

"We have lots of nurses coming up for retirement, which is going to cause problems with our workforce."

She added the Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) are "proactively" looking at this problem.

Also she believes the Kent and Medway Medical School will also help with recruitment.

However, she agreed geography was an issue, she said: "One of the problems is we haven't been able to attract some of the money from national schemes because on the face of it, we fill our trainee posts.

"That is a problem because it's the London effect as we have trainees who can't get on to schemes in London coming to train in Kent and Medway then leave and go back to London."