Kings Medical Practice News www.kingmedicalpractice.co.uk

Wakefield District L ocal I nvolvement N etwor k is a new organisation that is bringing together local people, organisations and groups who want to improve health and social care services. The organisation is independent from the NHS and local Councils which will allow it to take a critical look at services they provide. A key part of the governments NHS changes is the involvement of patients at the heart of everything that health and social services do. They plan to do this through an independent consumer champion for the public called HealthWatch. HealthWatch will be representative of various communities and local LINk groups will feed into this. If you have any comments about local health our social care services and would like to get involved in feeding back about these then Wakefield LINk is the place to go. To find out more about them click here to go direct to their website . Of course if you have any comments about the services at Kings Medical Practice then click here to em

No, its not a spelling mistake, we have a new GP trainee with us. Dr Katie (not Kate!) McGowan joined the practice last week. She is working part time and will be with us till she completes her training next year. And Dr Amesa Patel has left us. She got married on Sunday 1st May and has left us and moved to Norwich to be with her new husband. We wish Amesha well in the future and give Kate a warm welcome to the practice

The interim board of our local Commissioning Consortia was announced this week. Wakefield Alliance Consortia will replace Wakefield District PCT for commissioning care for our patients in 2013. There are eight doctors on the board. I have been successful in getting a place on the board together with two other Normanton doctors. The chair person is Dr Phil Earnshaw, he was brought up in Normanton and although his main practice is at Ferrybridge he occasionally does sessions at Park View Surgery on Castleford Road. The other Normanton GP on the board is Dr Paul Dewhirst from Queen Street. Both Dr Earnshaw and Dr Dewhirst were former trainees of Dr Ellis when the practice was at 63 Princess Street. There is lots to do and although I do not agree with all the changes it is the only show in town so it is imperative that GPs with a vision of how we can meet all the challenges put their heads above the parapet and get involved. Dr Joe Firth, who often has a wicked sense of humour, says that I

You may have been watching the Royal Wedding on Friday but I was reading my BMJ and there were a couple of interesting papers about the risks of DVT for women who take the combined contraceptive pill. One of the papers used data from the UK GP Research Database - they had a database of 318,825 women aged between 15 and 44. They found that women taking contraceptive pills containing drospirenole (brand name Yasmin) had nearly a two and half times the risk of having a DVT compared with women taking contraceptive pills containing levonorgestrol (like Microgynon or Logynon ). Of course when you unpick the statistics the numbers are not so scary - the risk of DVT for women taking pills containing levonorgestrol was 9 per 100,000 compared to 23 per 100,000 for women taking pills containing drospirenole - only a very small increase in absolute numeric terms. And the advice to women taking Yasmin who might be concerned is not to stop but to make a routine appointment and come and talk