Praise for Peterborough GP surgery as Minister for Care visits city

Thistlemoor Medical Centre has received praise from the Minister for Care during a visit on Friday (February 14).

The Secretary of State Stephen Kinnock MP, visited the surgery on Lincoln Road and received a tour of the medical centre as well as its new endoscopy unit.

The unit has been designed to help improve the health to residents in the centre’s care, offering them the opportunity to have any health concerns checked out and potentially dealt with before they become a serious health problem without the need to hospital treatment.

An endoscopy is a test to look inside your body. A long, thin tube with a small camera inside, called an endoscope, is passed into the body.

Dr Neil Modha said: “There is a tremendous opportunity with the endoscopy unit to make that work for local people. Instead of having to wait for longer times, we can get people seen in a community centre.

“A lot of people will say the residents locally are hard to reach or approach but the reality for us is that we see them everyday, we have really good access to our community and often they are people they work in really hard jobs and may not have family support locally, making things quite challenging for them. Giving that population health and support goes a long way.

“The earlier we find things, the quicker we can solve them for people.

“What we can do is use statistics to find out how often people are going to the GP or hospital and then we look to focus on them. We can talk to them about what is going on with their housing, their jobs, their support and see what support we can give them. Often it is not medical but we can link them up with people in the council who do that work. If you make things better for people, it has so much effect on their mental and physical wellbeing.”

Mr Kinnock MP added: “It has been amazing to see the integration between pharmacy, general practice, mental health as well as the new endoscopy unit. For us, it’s all about the shift from hospital to community, sickness to prevention and from analogue to digital. Thistlemoor encapsulates all of those key drivers for what we want to have in out 10-year plan for the future of our health and care system.

“There is a real patient centred approach to care. The whole set up is here, which is better for the system overall as people don’t have to be referred into hospital, when they don’t need to be and they can get the care they need in their local community. There is upstream work too preventing people from getting sick and prevention is always better than cure. Thistlemoor really does embody that virtue.

“We are working hard with the British Medical Association around putting a new contract in place, we’ve given them £889m uplift and we are negotiating about how we can help surgeries improve their digital infrastructure, how they can get more GPs and how we can improve continuity of care; bringing back the family doctor and how we can improve services to end the 8am scramble.

“Access is absolutely key, as well as quality of outcome. The way to achieve that is by bringing back the family doctor. All of the data shows that when a patient sees repeatedly the same doctor, you get far fewer repeat visits. That is something that has been lost over the last 14 years. We are fixing that, stabilising the system and bringing forward reforms for the future.”