Latest News from Chillington Health Centre
Goodbye Dr Harvey !
1st June was Dr Alison Harvey’s last day at ChillingtonHealth Centre, after 25 years spent delivering healthcare to our communities she is off to travel around Scandinavia while she ponders what to do with her spare time!
We wish her all the best in her retirement and look forward to seeing her in the village.
She will be a hard act to follow, but we are delighted to announce that Dr Tom Roe will be joining us as a GP partner in September. Some of you may remember Dr Roe as he completed his GP training with us a number of years ago.
There are far more GP vacancies than GPs and it is a real testament to the surgery that we had so many excellent applicants for the post.
The 800 patients registered to Dr Harvey will be allocated to Dr Mordue or Dr Carnegy who will both work extra sessions to accommodate the increased workload until Dr Roe joins us, but the summer is always extra busy so please bear with us. We have tinkered with the appointments system again to offer more face to face appointments without the need for initial telephone triage and to try and reduce the wait for non–urgent conditions.
When Dr Roe starts in September, he will be allocated his own patient list. We understand the frustrations around not being notified when your GP changes but unfortunately our systems are built for clinical reporting and not customer service. It is a painfully time–consuming process to allocate patients one by one when Dr Harvey leaves and again when Dr Roe starts. We just cannot spare the admin resources to send individual letters too. Clinical tasks must take priority as I am sure you would all expect.
More good news!
Leanne Brooks joins us on 1st June too. She is our new, full time practice nurse and working alongside Linda and Sophie we will be able to offer our patients a wide range of services. She is an Advanced Nurse Practitioner which means she can deal with a wide range of acute, on-the-day conditions and prescribe medication too.
We are delighted to welcome her to the practice, she hails from Derbyshire but has been living and working near Dartmouth for the last 2 years.
Dispensary update:
Our team will be working overtime before and after to reduce the impact of this on our patients and we hope to keep any inconvenience to a minimum.
It has been a difficult 6 months in our dispensary with prolonged staff shortages and delivery delays caused by supply chain pressures, so we are delighted that we have recently recruited 2 new team members.
Nikita has been with us for 6 weeks and is certainly helping to relieve the pressure on Jane and Julie by serving at the window.
Elli will be joining us full time in late June as our 3rd dispenser and this should mean that even when the unexpected happens, we can maintain our dispensing services.
We wanted to thank you for your understanding and all the positive comments that we have received about the team recently. It definitely feels like things are getting back to normal.
We have some exciting plans for dispensary, and we look forward to sharing those with you soon.
And finally, Genevieve our practice manager left us last week to take up a fantastic opportunity in the Civil Service. We wish her all the best and thank her for 7 years of epic organisational skills and multi-tasking.
So, It’s all change at Chillington!!
The pressures in Primary Care remain, but we are feeling genuinely excited about the future here and our whole team are committed to continuing to care for you and your loved ones.
