By ANISAH ARIF
Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust’s Primary Care Wellbeing service has been awarded a grant to look at the success of the service in helping people.
The service, working in partnership with GP’s, helps patients with long term conditions and ongoing physical symptoms, which may be caused by a psychological issue. The team is made up of physiotherapy, occupational therapy, specialist dietetics, volunteer counselling, and staff from Age UK.
The grant has been awarded by the British Psychological Society, through the Division of Clinical Psychology, to fund the evaluation of how having a psychology team within GP surgeries can benefit patients.
Suzanne Heywood-Everett, Clinical Psychologist with the Primary Care Wellbeing team at Bradford District Care NHS Foundation Trust said: “More than a quarter of people who visit their GP in the UK every day have problems which are primarily psychological rather than physical, but they don’t always receive access to the care that they need.”
Growing pressure in the NHS and a national shortage of GPs highlights the need to develop different approaches to meeting people’s needs, and the evaluation of this work will identify new alternatives and opportunities.
The grant will fund Centre for Mental Health, a leading mental health charity at the forefront of service evaluation, to assess and analyse the care delivered and the cost effectiveness of this work.
