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Medical Scribblings - August 3 / 2002

An interest of mine has been Medical Education and I thought that you might find this of interest too.

The present shortage of both Doctors and Nurses is causing a huge strain on the whole healthcare system and in particular on General Practice. All the time there are new developments in our treatments and management, so that not only does one need to try and remember the things you learnt years ago, but take on board all the new developments.

One way round the problem is to use the different skills of the surgery staff in new ways. Many of you now come to see the practice nurses for your management and in most circumstances get at least as good advice as seeing a Doctor. We are trying wherever to move the responsibility for you management to yourselves by explaining what we hope to achieve and then supplying the tools for you to do our work. A nice example of this has been the home Blood Pressure machines, which have become available and allow you to keep track of your own BP.

To come back to education, those of you who attend the surgery may well be familiar with Doctors and Nurses who are here to complete their training. We find them a great stimulus to improving the quality of service that we provide as they so often bring new insights into our work. It is most important that their training is centred on real patient problems as this brings home not only the strictly medical aspects of our work but sets it in the context of home and family.

For you as patients, we think that their presence not only gives you good medical care but, with luck, they will choose to continue in General Practice and be able to provide care in the future.

John Schofield