Thank you to all our patients who continue to support the surgery however they can. We continue to try to provide a good service, and we know you are aware of the difficult times the NHS is facing.

Our end of year Patient Participation Group meeting revealed concerns about the future of the NHS. The main thing for our locality is the reorganisation of community services management. You may have gathered from the news that we are part of an area attempting to put a financial umbrella over the business division between community and hospital healthcare costs.

The idea is that the enormous cost of an acute hospital bed can be better spent on services in the community. The impetus is on investing in more nursing staff (and others) plus better social care packages in the community to help prevent admissions and help discharge people from hospital. We have been advised that Royston should acquire a team almost twice its current size over the next couple of years. This is good news as we will have more resources to support our patients.

We have always been in a slightly difficult area, stuck on the edge of a very large county next to another very long county,but efforts to stitch together services and improve communication are succeeding. I think the changes do offer opportunities for Royston to fare better from healthcare resource planning; hopefully that will prove to be the case.

We reviewed three areas of development by the practice in response to issues we had discussed at the previous PPG meeting

Evening blood test appointments – helpful for the increasing need to monitor patients who are well and working, but have medication or conditions which need checking periodically. More recently blood test appointments online have become available, if requested by your GP.

Increasing impetus for a healthier lifestyle through exercise, weight loss and stopping smoking, promoting free or subsidised opportunities that can help people to achieve these aims. There is no doubt that this fantastically effective way to improve health – from improving mobility, mental wellbeing, breathing, risk of cancers/diabetes and heart disease – what works for you is important.

Community information services folder. We are putting together a folder of information which is kept in the waiting room and can be accessed by patients. This is a job in evolution which could well prove to be quite an indexing issue. However, if you have found something that has really helped you and you want to share it with others please check to see if it’s in there and let us know if it isn’t.

Other developments that might help our practice include:

the chemists move to provide a travel clinic service. Our support for people who are planning to travel staying healthy is unchanged. We provide updates and boosters for all the NHS vaccinations that form part of the population programme and these are important to check. However, many travel issues are not free or part of the NHS - malaria prescriptions, hepatitis, rabies, etc. So do make use of this service offered by chemists – it’s no more expensive and would save our practice nurses a great deal of time. However, please continue to get your regular NHS vaccines up to date with us.

short notice appointment requests. Getting the balance between pre-bookable and urgent appointments is, as ever, very difficult. We try our best to be responsive. If there is something that really needs to be dealt with that day please say so; we will always fit you in somehow! Routine appointments seem to be ok – it’s the ones in between. The best thing is to ask when is the next pre-bookable appointment? If there are no further requirements, i.e. which gp or exact times, we do have appointment choice. If you are particular as to who or when then it gets more difficult to find an appointment at short notice. We are aware of problems around appointments and are always looking for solutions.

We are sorry to say goodbye to Claire, our Practice Manager. She has worked very hard for our surgery over the past seven years and has overseen a lot of changes. Our new Practice Manager, Mark Atkinson, has started this week, full of enthusiasm.

Roysia Surgery, Burns Road, Royston, Hertfordshire SG8 5PT

Tel: 01763 243166 Fax: 01763 245315