THE PARISH COUNCIL OFFICE IS OPEN BY APPOINTMENT ONLY. PLEASE CONTACT US BY EMAIL – clerk@gamlingay-pc.gov.uk or leave a message on 01767 650310.
***All Parish Council meetings are now back in the Eco Hub. Members of the public are welcome to join. Please follow Covid safe guidelines below. **
- Wear masks on entry and until seated. Masks must be worn if not seated
- Use hand sanitiser
- Follow one way system, in through the main door and leave by the fire door
- Open doors and windows to allow air to circulate
- Sign in for Track and Trace
- Maximum room capacity of the Ellis/Maddocks room is 40
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Statement from the Partners at Greensands Medical Practice – 9.6.2021
Greensands Medical Practice cares for 12500 patients over a wide area and covering both town and rural areas.
The Practice offers care and access to this broad spectrum of patients. The patient demographic varies from babies just a few days old to elderly people over 100 years old
The Practice has good QOF (quality outcome framework) scores showing they provide high quality care.
The Practice has a good relationship with the CQC (Care Quality Commission) who rated the Practice as “good”.
The Practice has a good working relationship with the local CCG (Clinical Commissioning Group) and local PCN (Primary Care Network)
Throughout the pandemic the Practice has remained open, offering care and access to our broad spectrum of patients in many different ways. Patients have been able communicate with the Surgery in the traditional ways by face to face consultation and letter. Patients ae also able to communicate with the Surgery and access care via telephone, text, video consultation and via our website.
Despite the practice efforts to provide excellent care and access to services there is some local perception that access and service provision could be better.
This is very much the local face of a national issue. Access to GP appointments continues to be a hot topic nationally. It is often focused on in the national press and is continually debated in national GP circles. The Kings Fund produced a report on this issue prior to the last election. https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/projects/positions/general-practice
National GP publications also report on the ongoing crisis in GP retention and recruitment. These publications regularly report on increased general practice workload coupled with a limited resource to provide healthcare.
The British Medical Association spearheaded a campaign to reduce inappropriate un-resourced transfer of work onto GP Practices by hospitals. Several years ago a government initiative was launched with the aim of recruiting 5000 extra GPs nationally. The latest report suggests that in fact rather than the numbers increasing they have fallen by 651.
GPs and practices are under unprecedented pressure, delivering a far greater number of consultations with almost 5 million more appointments in March than they did the month before, and nearly 3 million more than they did in the same month two years ago, long before the onset of the pandemic. This is not just due to the serious impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, but also the major scale of the NHS backlog with millions more waiting for treatment, combined with falling numbers of GPs relative to the growing population, despite government pledges to address this. On top of this GPs and their teams are working incredibly hard to support delivery the hugely impressive COVID vaccination programme quickly and effectively. Please see the link from the BMA https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/nhs-delivery-and-workforce/pressures/pressures-in-general-practice
Despite these national issues affecting General Practice, the team at Greensands Medical Practice remains committed to providing excellent health care to its patients. The current Partners have a combined total of 80 years working as Partners at Greensands.
We work hard to maintain our credentials as a teaching practice. This enables us to attract bright young student doctors to undertake some of their training at Greensands
It also enables us to be in a prime position to encourage students to seriously consider the benefits of working in General Practice when they finish their training.
The Surgery also maintains an excellent network of local locum doctors who we regularly employ when needed to provide care at the practice.
The government published funding to General Practice via a recent initiative encouraging practices to join with the neighbouring practices in organisations called Primary Care Networks. These Primary Care Networks were intended to comprise of 5 to 6 practices and serve between 50 and 60,000 patients. The aim of the government was to provide healthcare resource to these networks instead of individual practices.
PCNs were encouraged to recruit and train additional staff to help in general practice. It was hoped that Clinical Pharmacists, Social Prescribers, Physiotherapists and Physicians’ Assistants could be recruited in the future to the PCNs and provide support to GPs working locally. We continue to work hard within the PCN in order to continue to provide the best care possible for our patients in a rapidly changing environment.
We hope that the Parish Council will support in helping make patients aware that they will at times be offered an appointment with an Alternative Provider who will be a highly trained Practitioner who will be able to deal with many health issues. This would mean that there will be more GP appointments available to deal with more complex health issues rather than these appointments been taken up with issues that could be dealt with more speedily and appropriately by other Health Care Professionals.
Please see below for your attention details of all the services patients can self-refer to or obtain further information without the need to contact the Surgery (please see our practice website for further information- www.greensands.org.uk under the Wellbeing Centre:-
- Musculo-skeletal conditions/Physiotherapy
- ICash – sexual health conditions
- Cognitive behavioural therapy/counselling
- Kooth – free and anonymous on-line counselling emotional support and well-being service for young people
- Path to Recovery – help with drug and alcohol
- Smoking cessation
- Social Services
- NHS choices for medical information
- Unplanned pregnancy
- Minor Eye conditions service
- Weight management
We also encourage patients to register online and complete requests via the website this rather than just ringing the Surgery.
It is our hope that the Parish Council can understand that the local issues are in fact a reflection of the national issues faced by GPs in our country.
The Partnership at our local Practice remains highly committed to delivering high-quality access and healthcare to its patients in the best way possible with the resources available.
We also remain committed to working hard regionally to maintain health care for our patients in a rapidly changing healthcare environment.
As a Practice, we are concerned about an increasing list size that is not followed by adequate funding from central government for General Practice services. We are however aware of funding options via section 106 and in the past the practice has benefitted from this by increasing the number of consultations rooms and thus being able to accommodate more clinicians to provide services to the community.
We would be most grateful for support from the Council to raise section 106 funding again. This is usually a task carried out by NHS England, however activity in this respect has been absent and it may be better dealt with locally.
The Practice has little room to accommodate the additional services the PCN is planning to provide and we are keen to explore options to improve our dispensary and to relocate our vast collection of historic paper records that we have to keep in order to free up space for patient facing activities. We also would like to improve access for disabled patients and we are looking into making better use of the limited space in Potton’s second floor. Section 106 funding would help to mitigate against some of the impact of an increasing list size.
We would be grateful for the support of the Parish Council in helping us continue to support our local community.
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Gamlingay Primary School dual use sports facilities – joint statement from Cam Academy Trust and South Cambridgeshire District Council 26.5.2021
The Cam Academy Trust (CAT) and South Cambridgeshire District Council (SCDC) have been in discussions for a number of months about the future of the community gym and multi-use games area (MUGA) at Gamlingay Primary School.
The discussions follow CAT making the difficult decision that it was no longer viable for them to run the gym due to a reduction in membership and income following the Coronavirus pandemic. The gym at the school is part of a dual use agreement with SCDC which ensures public access to the gym and MUGA. In recent years, the school site has changed from a middle school to a primary school and children at the school are too young to use the gym. However, they do benefit from use of the MUGA.
Both CAT and SCDC were keen to look at alternative options for the how a community gym could continue and SCDC employed Strategic Leisure Limited, who specialise in the strategic planning, development, funding, and operation of sports, leisure and cultural services and facilities, to do a full assessment. This work has shown that it is possible for the gym and MUGA to both continue to operate from the school site for the benefit of local people if an existing community interest company stepped forward, or a new group of volunteers could be formed to take it on. CAT have already committed to continuing to run the MUGA and make it available for community use if an alternative for the gym cannot be found.
The MUGA remains open for bookings through the school but the gym is currently closed. CAT’s staff who manage the gym remain on furlough to allow conversations with the local community on possible alternatives.
SCDC and CAT attended Gamlingay Parish Council’s meeting on Tuesday 25 May to give the latest information and to ask whether an existing community interest company or group of volunteers, could be found. SCDC is keen to hear from anyone interested in finding out more by Friday 11 June.
Contact Clare Gibbons on clare.gibbons@scambs.gov.uk or 01954 713290 or more information. You can also contact your local District Councillor, Bridget Smith on cllr.bridgetsmith@scambs.gov.uk or County Councillor, Sebastian Kindersley on skindersley@hotmail.com
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Key information
It’s really important that everyone helps to share the most up to date, useful and factual information in their communities to make sure as many people as possible are receiving the latest guidance on the virus.
•Common questions and answers on COVID-19 can be found on the NHS website, including advice for families, prevention, how it’s caught and spread, self-isolation, testing and treatment,foreign travel: www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19
•People are advised to use the NHS 111 online coronavirus service: https://111.nhs.uk/covid-19/
•Keeping up to date on social media – who to follow:
| Organisation | ||
| Public Health England | @PublicHealthEngland | @PHE_UK |
| NHS | @NHSEngland | @NHSEngland |
| Cambridgeshire County Council | @CambridgeshireCC | @CambsCC |
| South Cambridgeshire District Council | @SouthCambridgeshireDistrictCouncil | @SouthCambs |
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