Willow Tree Family Doctors News Blog

Apple has developed, in its latest software IOS 8.02, the capacity to link your personal health data held on your mobile devices ( iPhone  and  iPad ) using  Apple’s Health app  to your medical record held on our EMIS practice computer system. This might mean any data you record, such as blood pressure readings, blood glucose measurements, lung function test results or answers to health questionnaires can be uploaded direct into your files - straight from the measuring devices themselves - and integrated with the information we hold to produce a more complete picture of your health. As we open up more of your records for you to view, your experience of healthcare will become more interactive and participatory, to give you  greater  understanding and control over  your health. A good article in PC Magazine explaining the uses and benefits of this can seen here . We are trialling this in North West London  before  it rolls out nationally. There are obviously many practical and techn

November 18th is European Antibiotic Awareness Day . Why yet another "Day of this or that"?  Because we are in serious trouble, With growing antibiotic resistance and no new antibiotic groups in the pipeline, many infections previously easily treated with antibiotics are now proving increasingly difficult and often impossible to overcome. Before the advent of antibiotics in the 1940s, people used to die commonly and in large numbers from pneumonia, meningitis, TB, septicaemia and other everyday infections which, until recently, were curable with antibiotics. However, we are now seeing increasing death-rates from these infections due to drug resistance.  Each year in the United States, at least 2 million people become infected with bacteria that are resistant to antibiotics and at least 23,000 people die each year as a direct result of these infections. Many more people die from other conditions that were complicated by an antibiotic-resistant infection. The World Heal

GPs are under intense pressure from the government to provide ever more services for longer and longer hours and from patients, trying to find an appointment in increasingly overcrowded surgeries.  At the same time resources are being stretched as never before: in fact the proportion of NHS spending on general practice has fallen significantly over the last few years and many practices are facing financial problems.  With almost daily criticism of GPs in the press - much of it fuelled by politicians keen to find a fall guy for the continuing problems of the health service  -  it is no wonder that fewer medical graduates are choosing general practice as an option and that many are electing for early retirement. A crisis is looming. Practices under Pressure ,  is an excellent BBC Radio 4 analysis, presented in 'File on Four'.  It explains the gory details in a clear and balanced way and is available online until May 2015. It is recommended listening for those interested in the

Our appointment system may seem difficult to understand when you can't get the appointment you want. Why is it there is no appointment with the doctor of your choice at the time and day you want? It seems as if it is a problem at most practices and ultimately does come down to supply and demand.  We do try our best and have changed and tinkered with the appointment system many times over the last 30 years.  Firstly we offer the most ways currently available to access the appointments: in person of course, by phone (and we have many incoming lines), using an automated phone keypad operated system called Patient Partner (did you know this works even outside surgery hours?) and online - you can easily register for this from the main website - and this also operates all the time the computer is not backing up.  We offer standard appointments bookable up to three weeks in advance. A proportion of appointments for each doctor is held back for on the day booking (these are still book

A fascinating new health map has been published detailing a whole range of health indicators for each area of the country. For any of the conditions detailed, you just   enter a postcode or click through to a ward and a colour represents the prevalence of the condition you are interested in. Of course there are many problems with representing data so simply and the site has a lot of information about how to interpret and use the date: it is essential to look at this when studying the representations of information or very wrong assumptions can be made, especially with rarer conditions. Cause and effect is also very  difficult to assess as there are usually so many variables. But it's certainly interesting: why, for instance, is kidney disease a lot more common in Fryent ward than in nearby Queensbury? We'll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing easy to understand representations of very complex data - it's often the only way to assimilate it and there is a lot of