GPs offer more than medicine

Many people who visit the GP do not need medical help

Research published next week will show that a welfare service piloted in GP surgeries has reduced the pressure on family doctors and helped them to meet patients' needs.

Support workers based inside the surgeries mean that people who come to the doctor with a stress related complaint get instant access to help.

The GP's say that makes consultations 'more appropriate'.

And as a result the service could be a useful tool in the struggle to recruit and retain family doctors. BBC Health Correspondent Chris Hogg reports.

---

Dr Clare Goodheart is a family doctor in Hackney in North London.

A lot of the patients she sees have health complaints that she puts down to stress or problems like poor housing.

Pills or other remedies won't help and here there's an alternative.

Dr Goodheart said: "The well family service allows us to not take on the social problem but to redirect the problem which was coming to us in the first place to a more appropriate source of help."

Alice Cook is a support worker based in the practice. She is not a social worker - she is employed by a charity - which she says makes it easier to offer all sorts of help.

The service Alice provides makes a real difference Dr Goodheart says, and not just to the patients.

"We as GP's feel more effective feel less frustrated, are less likely to get burnt out and the result is that GP's don't want to leave GP's want to come and work here."

Young mother

The kind of help Alice offers is hard to define. On the day that we visited she was off to see Esther a young mother, who she started to work with several months ago.

Esther had gone to the doctor when she became depressed after the birth of her baby.

He told the BBC: "I was just willing to try anything really anything to help.

"It took me a while to open up and express my feelings and things like that, but eventually I did.

"It did feel good to talk to someone else outside the family - someone who isn't biased and isn't going to judge me."

And that's the point. Many of those who use the service have problems which have not yet become crises.

Agencies like Social Services or Housing departments don't always regard people like Esther as a priority or can only help with one part of their problem.

One person to talk to

Alice Cook says that is often what people find hardest.

"You go somewhere to talk about your housing, and somewhere to talk about your personal problems, somewhere to talk about your relationships, somewhere to talk about problems at the school.

"With the well family service you can talk to same person about all of those matters.

"If I don't know how to deal with something then I can put energy into finding out the best person to deal with it."

The service at Statham Grove surgery is one of five pilots assessed by researchers from Manchester university.

They found it reduced the demands on GPs because patients knew there was a support worker on hand to help with other concerns.

Proven success

Helen Dent, chief executive of the Family Welfare Association, the charity which runs the scheme, said: "What we've proved is that people are finding it very helpful to have a much broader range of services and help available in a GP practice.

"I certainly think that you could look at rolling this out across the whole of the UK and indeed we're going to see ministers and suggesting that they may wish to develop more well family services as part of their so called modernising agenda for primary care."

But there is one small problem - as usual it's money.

The pilots were originally funded by the government. When that money ran out, health services said the scheme was social care and were reluctant to fund it.

But social services said it was a health scheme and they should pay for it.

This research seems to show the scheme works.

Persuading someone to pay for it may be another matter.