This month in my series on how local GP practices are working within their communities to improve health and wellbeing we are taking a visit to Ashton, Golborne and Lowton GP Practices. The 8 GP practices in these areas support nearly 40,000 people between them. Together, they call themselves LiGA (Lowton, Golborne and Ashton).
Compared to many of the other areas in Wigan Borough, these 40,000 people are a little bit healthier. Less people smoke, fewer people are obese and there are slightly fewer cases of cancer, heart disease and kidney disease. As a result, people live on average about 2 years longer than elsewhere in the Borough.
However, this does not mean that all the people in Ashton, Golborne and Lowton live healthy lives, and that there isn’t work to do. The LiGA practices have been working hard to improve the wellbeing of everyone in their communities, but particularly those who are most likely to find it hardest.
This has included being flexible to make it easier for people with cancer, diabetes, learning disabilities and mental health conditions to attend their regular reviews.
They have also spent time making it easier for everyone to get an appointment at the practices.
This work has focused on bringing all the different ways of booking an appointment into one flow so that everyone gets the same access to appointments regardless of whether you want to book an appointment over the phone, by walking into the practice, or online. This makes booking an appointment easier and fairer, and the results are speaking for themselves with many of the practices getting much better than average feedback and scores on the GP Patient Survey.
Another approach the LiGA practices are taking is to find and reach out to people aged 40 and over who are living with high blood pressure but haven’t been diagnosed and so aren’t being treated. There are more people in Ashton, Golborne and Lowton living with high blood pressure than the Borough average and, if untreated, high blood pressure can lead to strokes and heart attacks, so making sure that it is treated and well managed does save lives.
To do this, the practices are identifying the people most at risk of high blood pressure and inviting them for a blood pressure check in the practice.There has been a particular focus on encouraging people from ethnic minority backgrounds who are more likely to have worse health. This work is going really well with over 50% of people people from ethnic minority backgrounds getting an updated blood pressure check. This quite simple approach will make a big difference and mean many people live a longer, healthier life.
They are doing similar work targeting women who are overdue their breast cancer screening.
The work being led by the practices in Ashton, Golborne and Lowton shows how GP Practices can work proactively to improve the health of their patients and their communities. Work like this is happening in practices all over the Borough; join me next month to find out more about what is going on in other areas.