1) Holistic care:
Mental health and social prescribing services are doing their best in our practice area but are massively under resourced. Don’t forget the critical importance of valuing continuity and teamwork in the primary care team – really important for safeguarding, morale and retention of staff. See Watton in BMJ, especially around Health Visitors and District Nurses within practice teams. Same points apply re social prescribing / CSW / Health Trainers
Due to the clear correlations between deprivation, psychosocial problems and physical health, it is a false economy not to invest in mental health and social prescribing as ultimately patients fall back on more expensive NHS services. Many of our patients are illiterate or have poor health literacy and so patients often fall through the gaps of traditional appointment systems with letters and phoning back to make appointments even if they are in the correct age range (which many are not as they are too young or housebound). Many of our patients are struggling due to being victims of emotional, physical or sexual violence: their anxiety can be displayed as anger or addiction.
Improving Access to Psychological Therapies
It is fantastic to have IAPT counsellors in the building (as you know many patients do not attend other sites) but due to the constraints they are working under often our patients living in the most deprived area of Sheffield do not fit the criteria as they can be chaotic or ‘not ready’ for the emotional challenge of counselling. I wonder if a more flexible type of approach could be taken, many of our patients need to build up trust with professionals over serial encounters before being able to engage – the IAPT triage service doesn’t allow for this, sadly.
Groups or lectures are on offer around the city but our patients struggle on many levels to attend these due to poor self esteem, confidence and practical issues such as buses, school pick up and travel costs.
I also wonder if a ‘trauma therapy’ approach may be more useful for our patients as I heard about this from another Deep End GP in Glasgow.
In summary there are great counsellors and charities working in our area doing outstanding work beyond their resources but it is insufficient due to the massive need on the our, patients fall through the cracks and this perpetuates poor health and greater pressures on NHS services. Investing more to support mental health services and social prescribing feels right on a moral and financial level to reduce inequalities.
2) Families and Children:
The links between early childhood experience and brain development has long been known and the field of epigenetics is emerging.
The local family planning clinic has been closed. We predict that unwanted pregnancies will go up in our area. We think investing in sexual health and contraception services, educating girls and women would help inequalities. Early years are crucial yet we have had the team dismantled – the overstretched health visitors are no longer in our practice. When I was a trainee in 2002 the health visitors knew all the families and who to worry about, came to all the practice meetings and we also debriefed over the kettle (a very underestimated source of support and sharing ideas and information!). Not having the health visitors in our practice feels like a serious threat to safeguarding.
My suggestion would be to get the health visitors and district nurses back in the practices and integrated in the teams – we need more of them too! We need more support to provide contraception, sexual health services and parenting sessions.
3) Multimorbidity & Complexity:
Again the links between deprivation and complex medical problems and multi morbidity at a young age have been proved and we need help to support our patients with these.
There has been a fantastic collaboration at The Whitehouse for many years between Prof Heller the diabetologist and the primary care team; once a quarter Prof Heller and his specialist nurses come for lunch and a cuppa at the practice and the Multidisciplinary team present our patients with Diabetes for a case discussion. These are complex patients who often won’t attend hospital outpatients. This opportunity of case discussion is so valuable on many levels. It builds personal relationships between primary and secondary care which allow a 2 way flow of information, education and morale essential to providing high quality care to patients. Our patients are not only suffering serious physical problems but the case discussion also allows us to acknowledge their complex lives and histories.
We have also been lucky enough to be part of a pilot with joint clinics between a Paediatric Registrar and GP trainee: this has been shown to reduce out-patient appointments and again develops supportive educational relationships.
We particularly need help with patients who have persistent pain and addiction to prescription drugs – experienced physiotherapists who are aware of issues surrounding deprivation would be a real asset to decreasing inequalities, as this could improve people’s chances of getting back into work and improve quality of life.
More educational cased based discussions between primary and secondary care specialists are fantastic educational opportunities and are invaluable to give the best patient care: Could we have more specialists coming to the practice like Prof Heller? It must be cheaper than running an out patient clinic and studies show that it does reduce referral rates and improve the quality of referrals.
4) Lifestyle: Smoking and getting more active.
We would like our stop smoking service back in the practice! Patients are reluctant to go to the ‘pharmacy’ for this, even though it is relatively close by.
We have recently been in discussion with SIV to see if our patients can have more support in our practice building to get more active and build confidence to going to other venues with someone they trust. The barriers to exercise are complex: one of my patients has flash backs to being raped by her brother and father when her heart rate goes up; another after being raped wanted to make herself obese so no-one would ever fancy her again. Our patients need kind, broad shouldered, flexible and good humoured health trainers to overcome these barriers.
Health trainers working in house with physios would be really helpful to reduce inequalities.