The Lambeth Food Co- op

We are very excited and privileged to be involved in this fantastic local project, bringing green fingers to the surgery grounds.

We now have 8 planters stationed next to the surgery which we are growing vegetables in. All patients are welcome to get involved.

There will be a weekly gardening session every Wednesday from 10.00am for 2 hours. No experience needed as there will be support on hand. Get to know your neighbours, and keep your vegetables once they are ready to eat!

If you’re interested in joining, please either ask at the front desk, contact Jonathan our Practice Manager or just pop along on Wednesday to find out more.

You can read about the impact of the scheme in a guardian article which Dr Sharma contributed to at this link: Guardian Article on the Lambeth Food Co-op

If you want to read more about how being green fingered might improve your health, please see this excellent summary by the Kings Fund: Kings fund summary

Breaking down Barriers to Health – Our Portuguese Project

IMG_0771Building on his interests in international medicine, Dr Sharma invited a GP – Dr Cristiano Figueiredo – from Portugal to the Grantham Practice in April 2015 to observe how doctors work in the community here.

Dr Figueiredo helped us set up an education day at the local Portuguese Community Speaking Centre. This now runs 6 weekly and covers topics from depression to diabetes. It has been fantastically received both by the community and also by gaining support from NHS Lambeth. This has developed into a much wider project now, where with a team of Portuguese doctors and nurses we have translated health materials, provided welcome packs and set up workshops for isolated and vulnerable groups.

The plan is to learn from this project and widen it to other groups of patients that experience inequality in healthcare due to linguistic and cultural barriers. Meanwhile Dr Cristiano has taken the idea back to Lisbon and is now supporting the Bangladeshi community in a similar way! This global health exchange has already started to be recognised in the Portuguese national press and by the World organisation of Family Medicine.

The Stockwell Methodist Women’s Group Health Education Sessions

The Grantham doctors were privileged to be invited to the woman’s group at the Stockwell Methodist Church for an evening in Autumn 2015. For this meeting we were asked to discuss cancers that affect females. In particulr focussing on what did they mean for a person, how to watch out for them, and how to reduce the risk of getting them. The evening was hugely enjoyed and received by everyone, and we were invited back to do further talks. As a result , this led to us providing sessions on high blood pressure and diabetes as well.
Since that time, this has now become a regular event in the Grantham calender and we hope to join up with the Clapham and Vauxhall branches of the church as well to reach an even larger congregation. We have asked the women to drag their men along as well!

KNUST-Grantham Health Partnership: Our twinning project with a family medicine clinic in Ghana

We are excited to announce that after months of planning we will be involved in an exciting and truly innovative project!

We are twinning with a family medicine clinic that is being developed by Dr Kwame Ayisi-Boateng at KNUST (Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology). The University runs a medical teaching hospital in Kumasi – the second largest city in Ghana.

Family medicine is in its infancy in Ghana with only 32 fully qualified GPs for a population of 26 million people (compared to 35,000 GPs for 60 million in the UK!) Not only do we hope to help support Dr Boateng and KNUST in their vision but along the way learn more about our own patients from Ghana and the wider West African region and how we can tailor our health advice to best help them.

One of our first themes will be the development of tailored diabetes education programs that take into account differences in lifestyle, diet and beliefs. As part of this we have building links with Kings College London and are proud to be on the steering group for their research into this:Click here

However the twinning project can be so much more and we want the whole practice to be involved including our patients. If you have skills that you think can help (e.g. infrastructure support, IT development, education) and would like to get involved then please get in touch with Dr Vikesh Sharma