Question:
I am a Personal Trainer with GP Referral - I am qualified to accept GP referrals for common conditions such as diabetes, anxiety, mental health issues, hypertension and obesity, and also able to provide a more comprehensive, specialist service to non-referred clients who also suffer from these conditions. With this qualification, I can provide consultations to GP referred patients and work with them to overcome common health problems. By providing the correct nutritional advice and specific exercise programmes, my expertise will help referred and existing clients to manage their medical conditions and live longer, healthier lives. I am struggling to get meetings set up with local medical practices and would like to know what the committee is doing to support this type of work?
Minutes:
Question
I am a Personal Trainer with GP Referral - I am qualified to accept GP referrals for common conditions such as diabetes, anxiety, mental health issues, hypertension and obesity, and also able to provide a more comprehensive, specialist service to non-referred clients who also suffer from these conditions. With this qualification, I can provide consultations to GP referred patients and work with them to overcome common health problems. By providing the correct nutritional advice and specific exercise programmes, my expertise will help referred and existing clients to manage their medical conditions and live longer, healthier lives. I am struggling to get meetings set up with local medical practices and would like to know what the committee is doing to support this type of work?
Answer:
Wokingham Borough Council Sport & Leisure provide a GP Referral pathway with local GPs and have been doing so for around five years now. The scheme has grown, and they now have a new computerised system Referral which captures all the data from members of the public and GPs. We have also increased our sessions by offering additional activities rather than the gym based, therefore patients can now play badminton, swimming, Pilates, and many more activities.
The Referral system also links into our other schemes such as Long Term Conditions, Steady Steps, Mental Health and Cardiovascular.
At present Wokingham Borough Council are linked into the work with the Health and Social Care, (CHASC) where members of staff both medical and social workers and members from Public Health attend weekly meetings at Wokingham Hospital to discuss individual cases where a multi discipline team are all sat around the table. The patients are then discussed with the GPs and we can then link in any cases through the GP referral system. This has worked very well and again increased the number of referrals. Therefore the GP Referral is a much wider service now.
Supplementary Question:
Ms Cousins asked a question around local support for the development of specific set programmes.
Supplementary Answer which was provided by Katie Summers and Jo Jefferies:
The responsibility for commissioning the GP referral scheme is actually the responsibility of the Public Health team which are held here with the local authorities. I would actually recommend that you contact the Public Health teams. There is not necessarily a point generally going to the GP systems themselves because what they will do is go directly to the Public Health teams themselves to get access to whatever services that they have commissioned as part of GP referrals. You have probably gone through the wrong route as such so it is worth actually contacting the Public Health team here. There is a really good package which is already in place for GP referrals and it is actually tied in to what was read out by Julian. That is actually working very, very closely with all the GPs and they are targeting individual residents and looking at which residents would be really ideally suited to getting our self-care message and activity. I would really recommend that you speak to the Public Health team here rather than coming through the GPs as it will not be the right group and I do not want you to waste your time. I can put you in contact with Darrell Gale.
I absolutely support the point that it is a Public Health commissioned service. That multi-disciplinary group that meets to review the needs of the resident for GP referral would be the group to consider adding additional services and service providers into the mix that they have. So there is already a well put together process if you like, in terms of the various providers, of which yours could be one of, but it is that process that you would need to feed into. There would be a process around that to make sure that there was a need to find an extra service and that for any provider commissioned to meet that need, there was no bias in the way that it is commissioned by the Public Health team.