Medical Advice | healthy pulses
Patients with Complex Needs or Long Term Conditions
Do you have Asthma, Atrial Fibrillation, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), Diabetes, Long Term Kidney Problems, Heart Disease, Hypertension (high blood pressure), Stroke Disease ? These are all complex or long term conditions.
We have been trying to improve our service and the quality of our support to help you manage your condition and, where possible, to prevent worsening. We aim to help you to help yourself – that is, to improve your wellbeing through medical and lifestyle management.
If you have one of these conditions, there is a risk of developing more. For those of you who have several, this has necessitated fairly frequent visits to the surgery. Previously we have called you in to separate nurse led clinics.
In line with current clinical thinking, we are now inviting patients to reviews for either Respiratory conditions (Asthma and COPD), or Diabetic, Heart conditions and High Blood Pressure – we are calling this a Healthy Pulses Clinic. Once you have managed to get your condition is under control, this should reduce the number of consultations and checks needed.
Patients are Reviewed using Clinical Risk Factors as:
- Low Risk, on supervised/supported self management. You will have a yearly check or review. This will not necessarily be at a clinic. You can take your own blood pressure readings at home or in our waiting room. These results will then be logged on the system as part of your management plan by the receptionist or health care assistant. You will hold their own healthy pulses patient medical record, on a card/booklet or on line.
- Medium risk patients will mainly be helped to manage in the healthy pulses clinic, but you will also self manage, if appropriate, by taking part in exercise classes, exercise referral schemes and the expert patient programme. You can also test your own blood pressure using the machine in the waiting room.
- High Risk patients will need to be doing all of the above and you may need some specialist nurse, doctor or consultant input e.g. Diabetic or Cardiac.
Appointments
You will be contacted by one of our reception team to make an appointment for a blood test and a consultation. You will be sent a letter of confirmation together with a questionnaire to complete and bring to the blood test. This will give the doctor and nurse time to consider and review your treatment and management plan before you attend.
- Healthy Pulses clinic will be held on Wednesday at Milborne St Andrew with 2 nurses and a doctor.
- Respiratory clinics Asthma on Monday and COPD on Thursday.
These will be supported in the Practice by:
- Smokestop on Monday and Lifestyle Advice on Tuesday at Milton Abbas
You may also be recommended, if it will help you to manage your condition, for:
- Exercise Prescriptions at the Leisure Centre
or
- Expert Patient Programme Short, informal group courses held by the Primary Care Trust to help you achieve a better quality of life. You will learn techniques to improve your ability to cope with pain or other symptoms you experience. More details of our Expert Patient Programme.
Other Activities | Remember prevention is better than cure!
We will continue to encourage all our patients to join in healthy activities by supporting publications such as the Get Active Magazine which give details of what is available near you.
In a village where there is not much provision, we try to fill the gap by starting off new activities. We are doing this with Health Walks, Tap Dancing and Gentle Stretch and Tone.
