News


		1st February 2010 Dr Louise Morgan Joins the Practice We are very pleased to announce that our new assistant, Dr Louise Morgan, has joined the practice. She brings with her a wealth of experience having been a GP since 1998. She has worked in Leeds, Cardiff, Merseyside and Morecambe. She is particularly interested in women's health and minor surgery. She lives with her family in the Kirkby area. 4th January 2010 Dr Sullivan’s New Part-time Job From 4th January 2010, I have reduced the time I spend in the practice to two days a week. The reason is that I have been offered a new job as National Clinical Lead for Primary Care at the NHS Information Centre. The Information Centre is an NHS organisation that is England's central resource for managing health and social care information to help local NHS organizations like GP practices and hospitals improve the quality of patient care. The job takes me away from the practice for three days each week. My role is to act as a clinical advisor to help make sure that the services and information that the Information Centre provides for General Practice are designed with an understanding of grassroots General Practice. I have been lucky enough to have thoroughly enjoyed my 25 years with Bentham Medical Practice, and in some ways it feels strange to be dividing my time. For many years I have been interested and involved in developing the use computer data for patient care, so I am very excited about having the opportunity to take on this second medical role. For the first few months Dr Arun Salvamani is covering my surgeries and in the summer the practice plans to appoint a permanent replacement and I will continue at the practice on Mondays and Fridays. 10th December 2009 Surgery Alterations If you have been past our Bentham Surgery in the last couple of weeks you may have noticed the mess. The weather has not been ideal for digging foundations but we apologise if it has caused you to have muddy shoes or boots or disturbed a consultation with your doctor. The purpose of all the activity is to add two new consulting rooms to the surgery. It is now 16 years since we last extended the building. We have made changes since then but there is simply not enough room so we had no choice but to extend outwards. We will soon have more doctors regularly working at the surgery and more trainee doctors as well. We are grateful to Brown and Whitakers for keeping the mess and the noise to a minimum though, if you have ever had an extension done at home, you'll know there is probably worse to come. 21st November 2009 Swine Flu Vaccination Scheme This morning we began our swine flu vaccination programme. We vaccinated over 300 patients who are at high risk of suffering complications from swine flu. We have tried to establish which of our patients are at high risk according to advice from the Department of Health and have written to over 1,500 patients to invite them to have a vaccination. We will be running more vaccination sessions. Now that the flu season is under way we want to vaccinate people as soon as we can. This means carrying out large numbers of vaccinations in single weekend sessions. Ingleton surgery is too small to hold the numbers that we expect to attend without spilling out onto the road so for safety reasons we will hold our early vaccination sessions at Bentham. We expect to be able to offer swine flu vaccination to all children under the age of five in December. There will be more news about our vaccination scheme on the website soon. If you want to know more about swine flu visit the NHS website http://www.nhs.uk/AlertsEmergencies/Pages/Pandemicflualert.aspx 29th June 2009 New Appointment System On Monday 29th June we changed the way we respond to requests for same day appointments. When you contact the surgery to ask for an appointment on the same day the doctor-on-call will phone you back as soon as possible. It may be possible to solve your problem over the telephone but if not the doctor will arrange an appointment for you. This may be an urgent appointment, an appointment later the same day, a routine appointment on a later day or a home visit. Our aim isto offer a more responsive service, to avoid a delay in recognising and dealing with medical emergencies and help usmake better use of our practice resources. Our patient survey results always show that many patients are keen for more consultations by telephone. The new system will make this possible as well. There is more about how our appointment system will work here. 3rd June 2009 Changing Surgery Hours at Ingleton On 1st June we introduced a new timetable for doctors and nurses. Our aim is to avoid the necessity for anyone to work alone at Ingleton and to ensure that there is always someone present to act as a chaperone when needed. To make this possible within our current resources we have had to re-schedule nurse hours and transfer some doctor sessions at Ingleton to the mornings. Heartbeat, diabetic and childhealth clinics where doctors and nurses work together will continue in the afternoon at Ingleton as before. There will be a knock on effect on all doctors' surgeries. To make the rota work successfully the doctors' timeteables will be different each week so it will be impossible to predict which days each doctor will be working in Ingleton or Bentham. Your GP will not be at Ingleton on the same day every week. Overall there will be the same number of doctor appointments available. You will still be able to book appointments on line. 1st April 2009 New Trainee Doctor Today, Dr Prudence Knight joins the practice for four months. She is a junior doctor in the second year of her postgraduate training, called Foundation Year Two. She will be working under the supervision of Dr Sullivan. She is the first Foundation Year Two doctor to work in the practice but more training doctors will be working in the practice in future. There is lots of information about the Foundation training scheme at this NHS website: http://www.foundationprogramme.nhs.uk/pages/home/key-documents 1st January 2009 New Business Manager We have a new member of staff. Mr Jonathan Scott has joned the practice in a new role for us as a Business Manager. He will have responsibility for commissioning, finance and IT management, an extensive portfolio that will benefit the practice and our patients. Jonathan is new to the health service having spent his career in management in private industry with companies such as Magnet, Heywood Williams and Pilkingtons. He has also run his own restaurant business in the past. Married to Jacqueline he has two daughters and a step daughter and step son. He lives in Bingley and is an active member of Bingley Little Theatre where he acts and directs and sits on the management committee. Most weekends are spent in the Lake District, walking and fishing. Remarking on his new role Jonathan said "I have been overwhelmed by the way the doctors and staff have welcomed me and made me feel at home. I am very much looking forward to working with them to ensure that Bentham Medical Practice continues to provide the very best level of care and service to all of its patients in the future." 1st October 2008 New Evening and Early Morning Surgeries Normal surgery hours are not very friendly for people who work. Beginning at 8:30am and finishing at 6pm means taking time of work to see your GP. We have introduced new surgeries in the mornings from 7:30 and in the evenings from 6pm to 8:30pm just for working people. There will be one or two of these extended surgeries each week. You can book an appointments in one of them in the usual ways but if you are retired or you want to bring a child to see the doctor please use one of our ordinary surgeries. We expect the surgeries to book up in advance and will not be saving any appointments or urgent problems. If you require a doctor urgently between 6:30pm and 8am, please contact the emergency out of hours service. The usual surgery telephone number (61202) will transfer you automatically to their call centre. 1 August 2008 Dr Khalid Alshawy Dr Alshawy is our new registrar. He will be with us until the end of July 2009 to complete his training as a GP. He graduated from Basra Medical School, Iraq in 1994 and worked in Basra for two years and then went as volunteer doctor. to Yemen. He came to the UK in 1999, and embarked on the surgical rotation in Burnley General Hospital (Accident and Emergercy, orthopaedics., general surgery, vascular surgery and urology). He then worked in Accident and Emergency in Manchester area until August last year when he started his GP training with six months in paediatrics and six months in endocrinology and stroke medicine. He is married with two children. Meanwhile Dr Zubair Alam has completed a very successful year in training at Bentham, having passed all his exams and obtained Membership of the Royal college of General Practitioners, he has moved on to a post with a practice in Kings Lynn in Norfolk. Zubair was very popular with patients and the practice and will be much missed. We wish him, Shabina and Fatima every success in their new 'hill-free' life. News Archive > Top












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Grasmere Drive High Bentham Lancaster LA2 7JP Open Monday to Friday 8.20am-6.20pm Tel: 015242 61202 Fax 015242 62905 For all telephone enquires Repeat Prescriptions Tel: 015242 42497 (24 hours/day) or via My Practice Online When the surgery is closed: Tel: 015242 61202 Out of Hours services are provided by Cumbria Health on Call 20 July, 2010