This practice is delighted to be signed up to the Green Impact for Health Toolkit and is actively taking steps to reduce our carbon footprint. 

The climate emergency is also a health emergency, and health care in the UK contributes 4-5% of the UK's carbon emissions. We need to enhance the health of today’s population without compromising the health of future generations, and this means operating within the sustainable boundaries of the planet. Fortunately, most of the solutions for the planet also make our health better - for example eating a mainly plant-based diet, engaging in active travel and exercise in nature, avoiding smoking, reducing pollution etc. These activities all enhance our health and reduce our need for medications, with further benefits to the NHS, your health and the carbon footprint of healthcare. Take a look at the Greener Practice website to learn more about this

Collective Action What is Collective Action We, along with all other General Practices have been taking on additional work for hospitals in recent years. This work takes time and resource, which takes us away from managing our primary services for you. Therefore, all General Practices have voted overwhelming to start ‘collective action’. This is an identification and general push back of the work which has been creeping into primary care. Why Collective Action is needed: We are concerned about three main areas: Patient Safety: The numbers of patient consultations we complete in a day means that we are not practising as safely as we would like Workforce: The huge workload is making it difficult to recruit and retain staff, and levels of burnout are high Funding: We are not being funded sufficiently to recruit more staff for the demand we are facing Collective Action draws attention to these problems so we can offer you the best possible care in the long run. What this means for you: The practice will be open as normal. But you may see changes around appointments and services: We will return work to other healthcare providers (Hospitals) where they should have completed that part of care. This includes referrals, fit notes, starting prescriptions, investigations, and responding to patient queries. We will not take over prescribing medications that were started by specialists, unless there is funding for this work. We will not provide monitoring checks for certain conditions, where this should be done by your hospital/specialist team. We will work towards clinicians having a safe workload. This means they will not see more patients than they can cope with. There will probably be longer waits for routine appointments. If you need urgent care, you may be directed to an urgent treatment centre or a pharmacy, depending on what is wrong. We are sorry for the inconvenience this may cause and ask for your understanding and patience. We are taking every possible step to minimise disruption to your care. We hope this action will bring meaningful changes, which benefit our patients and the healthcare system. Thank you for your support, patience, and understanding during this challenging time. Please be kind to our staff. They want to help you get the care you need and will do everything they can to do that.