Bringing care back into our communities

Tuesday, 21 September 2010 08:19

The healthcare message from the government is loud and clear - the focus now, and for the future, is firmly placed on you the patient. Treating you closer to home, getting you involved in selecting the services you want in your community and providing healthcare that might traditionally have been administered in hospitals, through GP surgeries.

At DMC Healthcare, we have been working hard to bridge the divide between hospital and local community care.  This means that we are already one step ahead, having recently introduced several new services designed to improve patient care closer to home.

Minor surgery – warts and all!

Many people don’t realise just how many minor surgical procedures can be undertaken in their local GP surgery.  From cryotherapy (freezing to remove warts or skin tags) to injections, skin biopsy and the insertion and removal of contraceptive implants, ingrowing toenails or even skin lesions, our practices offer a wide range of minor surgery services. In fact, we are so dedicated to progressing our services in this area that we recently opened a state-of-the-art minor surgery suite at our Chadwick Road practice in Southwark. It provides a central hub for six local practices in the area and is one of just five suites of its type within Southwark.

Keeping an eye on the future – community ophthalmology services

We are already working with a number of healthcare commissioning bodies to provide community eye or ophthalmology clinics in areas where local hospitals are no longer able to provide such services themselves. For example, when Maidstone and Tunbridge Wells PCT announced it was to close its weekly ophthalmology clinics at Sheppey Community Hospital due to consultant shortages, DMC Healthcare was approached to take over.  For the local island community, continuing a high quality service at the hospital was really important. They had already witnessed a decline in healthcare services and had the ophthalmology clinic been withdrawn, they would have been forced to travel to either Maidstone or Sittingbourne for appointments – up to a 20 mile round trip at best and a 40 mile round trip at worst.

Our ophthalmology clinic opened its doors on the 4th September 2010 and we were able to treat 14 patients in the first clinic.  There were 12 additional new patients in the first week and it has been warmly received by optometrists, GPs and patients alike – proof that these services really do matter to the local community.

Headache clinics

The team at DMC Healthcare has been taking the pain away from the neurology departments at local hospitals, reducing the number of referrals they receive so that they can focus on treating patients with more complex neurological disorders. We’ve achieved this by setting up headache clinics in the local communities we serve.  Specifically, we have been working extensively in Southwark where our clinics are led by a GP with a specialist interest in headache, Dr Ranjan Das. They treat patients who have previously been referred to neurology outpatients departments who need assistance with difficult to manage migraine, chronic daily headaches, cluster headaches or those with an unclear diagnosis. The clinics are currently based at our practices in Southwark and can receive referrals from GPs across the borough.

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