We recommend all children should be fully protected. The health visitors, practice nurses or the doctors can advise you.

All women aged between 25 and 64 are invited for cervical screening. Women aged between 25 and 49 are invited for testing every three years, and women aged between 50 and 64 are invited every five years

You will be sent an invitation to attend when your smear is due. 

Patient Information on Blood Pressure Management at Mowbray Square Medical Centre

We are working hard to make sure we manage our patient’s blood pressure as well as possible. Part of this work is to try to identify patients who have high blood pressure but are not aware of this. We also contact all patients known to have high blood pressure for an annual review in their birthday month.

We may contact you at other times if you are overdue a blood pressure check. Making sure we control blood pressure is one of the best ways to reduce your risk of having a heart attack or a stroke. You might have already received a text message from us asking you to come and get your blood pressure checked. We wanted to explain a bit more about why this is, and what happens when you have given us your blood pressure readings.

What is High Blood Pressure?

High blood pressure, or hypertension, rarely has noticeable symptoms. But if untreated, it increases your risk of developing serious health problems such as heart attacks and strokes.

High blood pressure is one of the most common conditions in this country – more than one in four adults in the UK have the condition. Over 600,000 people living in West Yorkshire and Harrogate are affected by high blood pressure.

The following website explains much more about blood pressure, what your readings mean, and what your can do to reduce it:

Who will check my blood pressure at the surgery?

You may have your blood pressure checked when you have an appointment at the surgery. This could be done by a doctor, a nurse, a health care assistant, or a one of our Clinical Pharmacists.

Blood Pressure Pod

You can also check your own blood pressure using the pod in the ground floor reception of Mowbray Square. The results are accessed electronically by our Clinical AdminTeam, who will review them, following our BP pathway. If you have a very high or low reading, you will be asked to take your print out to the Patient Services team in your surgery.

The Blood Pressure Pod should not usually be used by patient’s known to have Hypertension. This is because it is much more accurate for this group of patients to monitor home blood pressure instead.

Sometimes we will ask you to drop in to use the pod. We may send a text message about this. There are several reasons we might ask you to do this, such as:

• You have not had a blood pressure reading for a long time
• As part of the review for some of your medication (such as the combined contraceptive pill)

Home Blood Pressure Readings

You may also be asked to provide us with home blood pressure readings. There are several situations when we might request this:

• If your blood pressure reading taken by a member of our team in the surgery is high, we will usually ask you to monitor it at home for a week, as it might be lower there.
  • Home readings give us a more accurate understanding of what your blood pressure is usually like, and we usually use these figures to make treatment decisions.
• If you are on medication for high blood pressure, we will ask you to do some home readings when you are due your annual review.
• If your blood pressure medication has recently been adjusted, we usually ask you to repeat your readings at home a few weeks later

How to Submit Home Blood Pressure readings

• When we invite you to do home blood pressure readings, we will also send you a blood pressure monitoring questionnaire by text message. This requires you to send back readings every morning and evening for 7 days. The readings will then be reviewed following the pathway at MSMC.
• You can also post your readings on paper to us. Please make sure your name and date of birth is included.   

Home Blood Pressure Monitors

All of the Mowbray Square practices have blood pressure monitors that we can lend out for you to monitor your blood pressure at home. The following website explains in detail how to record your BP at home and how to buy a monitor, if you want to purchase one:

Who reviews blood pressure readings received by the surgery?

We have a detailed protocol followed by our clinical admin team, used to review blood pressure reading submitted by patients. You will be notified when your blood pressure has been reviewed, and whether any further action is necessary. If your treatment needs changing, we will invite you to book a telephone call with one of our clinical the pharmacists.

We have an excellent team of clinical pharmacists at Mowbray Square, who are highly skilled in blood pressure management. If you need treatment for high blood pressure, they will follow our local guidelines on the best way to treat your blood pressure. They work closely with GPs and nurses and will discuss any complex cases.

Strayside Health and a number of other local GP practices have partnered with Yorkshire Health Network to provide a specialist Travel Health service for our patients and patients in Harrogate, Knaresborough and the surrounding area.

Patients requiring Travel advice are to seek advice a minimum of 6 to 8 weeks prior to date of travel as some travel destinations require a course of injections.

The Travel Clinic is an accessible, expert service and vaccines available free of charge on the NHS, will remain free of charge. Non-NHS vaccines are charged privately. These include Hep B, Rabies, Jap Encephalitis and various other vaccines.

To book an appointment, please contact via email to yhn.travelservices@nhs.net 

Alternatively, contact Strayside Health on tel 01423 566574 and we will be able to book you an initial telephone consultation appointment with the travel Nurse in the Yorkshire Health Network Travel Service.

Practice stance on prescribing of Diazepam for Fear of Flying

At Strayside Health, we will not prescribe Diazepam for patients who wish to use this for a fear of flying. We have several reasons why we have taken this decision:

1. Diazepam is a sedative. This means, the medication makes you sleepy and more relaxed. If there would be an emergency during the flight, this could impair your ability to concentrate, follow instructions, or react to the situation. This could seriously affect the safety of you and the people around you.
2. Sedative drugs can make you fall asleep, however, when you sleep it is an unnatural non-REM sleep. This means, your movements during sleep are reduced and this can place you at an increased risk of developing blood clots (DVT). These blood clots are very dangerous and can even prove fatal. This risk further increases if your flight is over 4 hours long.
3. Although most people respond to benzodiazepines like Diazepam with sedation, a small proportion experiences the opposite effect and can become aggressive. They can also lead to disinhibition and make you behave in ways you normally wouldn’t. This could also impact on your safety and the safety of your fellow passengers or could lead you to get in trouble with the law.
4. National prescribing guidelines followed by doctors also don’t allow the use of benzodiazepines in cases or phobia. Any doctor prescribing diazepam for a fear of flying would be taking a significant legal risk as this goes against these guidelines. Benzodiazepines are only licensed for short-term use in a crisis in generalised anxiety. If this is the problem you suffer with, you should seek proper care and support for your mental health, and it would not be advisable to go on a flight.
5. In several countries, diazepam and similar drugs are illegal. They would be confiscated, and you might find yourself in trouble with the police for being in control of an illegal substance.
6. Diazepam has a long half-life. This means it stays in your system for a significant time and you may fail random drug testing if you are subjected to such testing as is required in some jobs. 

We appreciate a fear of flying is very real and very frightening and can be debilitating. However, there are much better and effective ways of tackling the problem. We recommend you tackle your problem with a Fear of Flying Course, which is run by several airlines. These courses are far more effective than diazepam, they have none of the undesirable effects and the positive effects of the courses continue after the courses have been completed.

We recognise that there may be a waiting list for these courses, so if you plan to fly before you are able to complete a course, there is lots of information available online, including tips for reducing anxiety before and during a flight and recommendations for in-flight meditation and mindfulness apps

Fear of Flying Courses

Easy Jet

www.fearlessflyer.easyjet.com

Tel: 0203 8131644

British Airways

http://flyingwithconfidence.com/courses/venues

Tel: 01252 793 250

Virgin Atlantic

https://flyingwithoutfear.co.uk/collections

Tel: 01423 714900 1252250

The number of patients seeking dental advice and treatment from their GPs is increasing.

GPs are not responsible for treating dental problems. The GMC requires doctors to have the appropriate skills and training for any treatment they provide. The GPs at the surgery have no dental training and are therefore not covered by their medical indemnity to provide advice or treatment for dental problems.

Therefore, if it is determined that the condition requires only dental treatment, then GPs are legally and contractually obliged to direct the patient to the appropriate dental service.

General dental practitioners have an ethical responsibility to provide access to advice and emergency treatment for their patients, including those under a private contract and to provide access to emergency treatment outside normal hours.

If you are not registered with a dentist, or are unable to contact your dentist, please contact NHS 111 where they will be able to advise you about other emergency dental services

To find a dentist near you: NHS Find Dentist Services.

We are seeing increasing requests for weight loss injections, following recent media coverage.

Unfortunately GPs are not able to prescribe this medication at this stage for weight loss. There is an aim in the future for this to occur but not at the moment.

In North Yorkshire, we have to follow the commissioning guideline and national guidance which states the drug currently has to be prescribed by a Tier 3 weight management service in appropriate patients. There is also a national shortage of this drug so supplies are very low currently.

The criteria to refer to Tier 3 is as follows:

• Aged 18Y+
• BMI equal to or over 40 or 35 with significant co-morbidities.

AND

• Have maximised primary care and community conservative management e.g. a Tier 2 service

You can refer yourself for Tier 2 weight management support at Fit4Life

Fit4Life project – Brimhams Active

or if you are living with obesity and hypertension, diabetes or both you can be referred to the NHS Digital Weight Management Programme

NHS England » The NHS Digital Weight Management Programme

Please complete an eConsult if you would like a referral for this

If you are unhappy with this, you can complain directly to the Humber and Yorkshire ICB commissioning organisation (hnyicb.contactus@nhs.net).