To start 2024, we wanted to introduce our clinical team to the world like never before! You may already know that OSMP has 7 GPs, including 4 partners who own the surgery and make all the administrative and business decisions; vitally important and mind-boggling work, on top of all their consulting room clinical conundrums.
Between us we have 137 years of experience as doctors! Like the majority of GPs around the country, we all work 3 or 4 days at OSMP, and then do other jobs too, such as teaching, Out-of-Hours, working in other healthcare centres (such as the hospice), or for local healthcare boards. This keeps us in touch with the wider healthcare community as well as keeping us on our toes with current medical guidelines, and being involved with supporting the next generation of GPs coming through local university and specialty training programmes.
So if you’re sitting comfortably, allow me to start with Dr Rob Guion, who has been at OSMP for 15 years, and has a special interest in allergies. You can often find him in room 2 at Copmanthorpe, or representing our patients and staff at local Primary Care Network meetings so we can keep up to speed with what initiatives are being rolled out, like new vaccination programmes or community phlebotomy clinics.
Over the past few years, you may have seen that Rob has been very supportive of our environmental leaps and strides. He was featured in this York Press article, helping set up recycling in 2019 as a way to help reduce our carbon footprint, and he's also made changes to reduce his own carbon footprint:
"Over the past few years during the Green project at OSMP I was using a massive number of disposable coffee cups, and felt guilty about this. So now I have a reusable cup, which has meant fewer cups thrown away, plus lots of coffee shops do a discount if you take your own cup."
And as a keen car and tech enthusiast he has switched to a fully-electric vehicle which, with his trademark stoicism, he describes as "environment over image". Rob has also been instrumental in encouraging the clinical team to reduce wasted medications. This isn't just a problem here at OSMP; in fact medication waste is a national issue, costing the NHS about £300million per year. Per year! That’s enough to pay for a 100,000 overnight stays on ICU, 500,000 MRI scans, or 150 million cholesterol blood tests. Basically, it’s a massive haul of money we could plough back into our health service, so it seems crazy not to try to address it. Luckily the quick-links Rob has set up make it much easier for GPs to prescribe small 'starter packs' for medicines that have a high incidence of unpleasant side effects. We’re making good progress since introducing them a little over a year ago, seeing fewer unused tablets going up to the tablet farm in the sky.
So, better for the planet and still the same high standard of care we strive to provide each day. Thank you Rob!