PRACTICE PROFILE THE KER PRACTICE
Janette McMillan (left) and Kathleen Diamond of The Ker Practice
Jim Killgore visits a Glasgow practice where deprivation and ill health are all too closely linked
N
OWHERE in Britain is health inequality more obvi- ously a matter of geography than in the city of Glasgow. Travel from the leafy affluent suburb of
Bearsden north of the city to the housing estates of the Gorbals four miles south and average life expectancy for males drops nearly eight years from 79.4 to 71.6. Scotland has long held the reputation as the “sick man”
of Europe with life expectancy at birth less than any EU country apart from Portugal. And central Glasgow lies at the bottom of the table in Scotland. The public health challenges faced by healthcare and social care profession- als here are immense. Staff at The Ker Practice know well the effects of
poverty and chronic deprivation on a patient population. The practice operates at two sites serving the Gorbals and the nearby districts of Croftfoot and Castlemilk. Croftfoot Road Surgery is only a short taxi ride across the River Clyde from the offices of MDDUS in central Glasgow. It is here I have been invited to meet the practice’s two managers. Croftfoot Road is the “hub” surgery of The Ker Practice and lies on a quiet residential street of semi-detached houses. The practice has seven GP partners and over 15 staff with a patient list of around 10,300 both here and at the Gorbals Health Centre. “We may only be three miles apart but the patients here
are completely different from the patients at the Gorbals,” says practice manager Kathleen Diamond as we chat in her office along with co-manager Janette McMillan. “There is a huge difference and much of it to do with deprivation.”
NO MEAN CITY Certainly the Gorbals has long been synonymous with urban poverty. The writer Alexander McArthur in his sensationalist novel No Mean City recounted stories of its razor gangs, poverty and overcrowding. In the 1960s many of the older slums were razed and replaced with high-rise towers but the damp and soulless housing seemed only to
10 AUTUMN 2011ISSUE 5
Top
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16