Ash Surgery Newsletter

No 9. Winter 2025 

Update Sue Skinner has been the Practice Manager at Ash since June 2019 but she has now departed for pastures new.  She tells us that she has no plans set in stone yet.  We wish her well with whatever she gets involved in. 

You will have seen her update in the last newsletter where she told us that the new Business Manager for the Practice is Kofo Macgregor-Gauthier who started in September.  Kofo will be introducing herself in the next newsletter.  

Correction 

In the last newsletter The Surgery gave us a new email address for ordering repeat prescriptions by email.  Unfortunately the address was incomplete.  The letters "kmicb" were missing from the front.  So the correct address is 

kmicb.ashsurgeryprescriptions@nhs.net

Apologies if you've been led up the garden path (especially at this time of year when it's a bit muddy out there!)

What is Ash Surgery PPG?

Ash Surgery has had a PPG (Patient Participation Group) for a number of years now and is entering a new phase, which is very exciting.

Firstly our PPG is not to bve confused with a school governing body.  We are not critical friends who inspect and hold staff/working practice to account. 

Far from it.

We literally are a group of volunteers who act as a half way house between the surgery staff and its patients.  We feed ideas back and forth and try to raise awareness of issues to which patients may be oblivious, and help the surgery to improve its services. 

A GP practice is very different from what it was 40 years ago.  In Ash we no longer have the district nurses based here.  We no longer have an on-call doctor who will come out at 3a.m. in an emergency!  Yet the surgery offers many more services, and in many ways has improved on what it was.  The secret is to know how to use the service for everyone's benefit.

This is where we as a PPG have a key role to play and we meet 3 times a year to discuss various issues. 

For example, let's say one member has elderly friends and they aren't sure how to make an appointment to see a doctor for a routine matter as they are in their 80s and "e-consult" and triage confuse them.  We would them to discuss this and work out how to reach out to elderly members to make them aware of all the avilable options and publicise it through this newsletter and other methods that we have at our disposal.  

We are also making contact with local parish magazines.  Regular articles help patients get the best service possible. 

It's a two way street.  The surgery will make us aware of issues that we need to draw to patients' attention and the patients will tell us things that we need to pass back to the surgery - and we find a solution to the problem.  As healthcare changes and GP working practices change, we are there to help to make things run as smoothly as possible for everyone. 

We have several things in the pipeline that we are trying to develop. 

One is finding volunteer drivers to help get patients to and from the surgery to an open afternoon where anyone lonely or vulnerable can just pop in, have a chat, have a cup of tea and ask any questions without worrying about whether they should or shouldn't see a doctor.  That is in the pipeline and the PPG will be working on it to bring it to fruition in the future. 

We also need members from all the villages/hamlets and town that our catchment area covers to be our eyes and ears and to help us reach out to the communities in our area. 

We have a patient satisfaction survey which we have devised.  It's completely anonymous and it gives the surgery feedback as to how everything is going and how satisfied patients are.  There will be posters going up in quite a few different places with a QR code to take you to it directly.  Please fill it in if you get a chance.  We are constantly reviewing the data and if a problem occurs it will be picked up and action taken.  We all want a good, efficient surgery at the end of the day and the survey is a good tool to help us achieve this.  Or just pick up a survey form from reception, fill it in and hand it back. 

I hope this explains a little as to what we are about if you were unsure.  If it appeals to you, then we would love to see new faces join us and work with us to achieve our goals.  If you are interested please enquire at the surgery reception. 

Andrew Minter (PPG Chairman)

Alcohol - again!

We told a cautionary tale about alcohol in the last newsletter.  "No amount is safe", we said.  "It's on a par with asbestos, radiation and tobacco" we said.  And we were on solid ground; our source was the World Health Organisation and the NHS. 

Who could argue?

New, it appears, a study has been done at The University of Barcelona.  They've concluded that drinking a glass of wine every night halves the risk of suffering a heart attack comparewd with the risk among abstainers.  It can be as effective, they say, as taking statins and has a "much greater protective effect" than previously thought. 

The university have made a big thing of the study, but ..... there's one small problem.  The guinea pigs being studied were also put on a "Mediterranean diet" involving lots of olive oil, vegetables and fish - for five whole yeasr!

Unsurprisingly, those who query this study say that if the group had been put on a full English Breakfast diet and had lived to tell the tale, thish would indeed sugest that the wine possesses potent protective properties - alliteratively speaking!

It seems that the water in this study has been muddied - or there was too much sediment in the tipple!

The conclusion we're forced to arrive at is clear - choose not only your wines carefully but also your medical research studies.  To young a wine or too ill-thought-out a study can lead to dissapointment.  

The purpose of the Newsletter is to keep patients informed about medical matters generally and the running of Ash Practice in particular. 

If you have anything that you feel needs to be brought to the attention of the Practice, or other patients, please let us know and, and, hopefully, we'll be able to see that it gets an airing in the Newsletter.