The NHS Health Check is a free check-up of your overall health. It can tell you whether you’re at higher risk of getting certain health problems, such as:
- heart disease
- diabetes
- kidney disease
- stroke
If you’re over 65, you will also be told the signs and symptoms of dementia to look out for.
If you’re aged 40-74 and you haven’t had a stroke, or you don’t already have heart disease, diabetes or kidney disease, you should have an NHS Health Check every five years.
Any follow-up tests or appointments are also free of charge.
How will the NHS Health Check help me?
As well as measuring your risk of developing these health problems, an NHS Health Check gives you advice on how to prevent them.
The risk level varies from person to person, but everyone is at risk of developing heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, kidney disease and some types of dementia.
Your NHS Health Check can detect potential health problems before they do real damage.
What happens at the NHS Health Check?
An NHS Health Check takes about 15 minutes.
The health care professional – often a nurse or healthcare assistant – will ask you some simple questions about your lifestyle and family history, measure your height and weight, take your blood pressure and do a blood test – often using a small finger prick test.
Based on this, they will be able to give you an idea of your chances of getting heart disease, stroke, kidney disease and diabetes.
If you’re over 65, you will also be told the signs and symptoms of dementia to look out for.
You will then receive personalised advice to lower your risk. This could include talking about:
– improving your diet and the amount of physical activity you do
– taking medicines to lower your blood pressure or cholesterol
– how to lose weight or stop smoking
If you prefer, you can ask to see a man or a woman, but the questions aren’t embarrassing and you won’t have to take your clothes off during the check.
Read more about NHS Health Checks
We offer a range of services and can provide:
- confidential advice about contraception
- the combined oral contraceptive pill
- the progestogen-only pill
- progestogen contraceptive injections
- confidential advice about STIs, STI testing and treatment
- cervical screening
- “well woman” screening
We can also refer you for the following:
– insertion or removal of the contraceptive implant
– free emergency contraception
– unplanned pregnancy advice
– pre-conception (pre-pregnancy) advice and information on fertility problems
– fitting and checking of caps, diaphragms, IUDs (intrauterine devices, or coils) and IUSs (intrauterine systems, or hormonal coils)
Specialist Contraception Clinics
Some contraception clinics may also offer specialist services, including:
- counselling for incest, rape and sexual abuse
- vasectomy (male sterilisation) counselling and procedures
- pre-abortion and post-abortion counselling and referral
- gynaecology clinics
- menopause clinics
- female sterilisation counselling and referral
There is a growing epidemic of chronic disease in the UK due to tobacco use, unhealthy diets, physical inactivity and other risk factors. Whilst it is important to prevent these diseases from happening in the first place (which we are also trying to do – termed ‘primary prevention’), it is also important to prevent them from getting worse or causing other problems in patients who already have them (this is called ‘secondary prevention’). With good management of chronic diseases, people can live longer.
Offering good co-ordinated care that is in line with national and local guidance reduces the fragmentation of care and also reduces the risk of clinical error (including medication errors) and thus litigation risk. In summary, by optimising the management of a patient’s chronic disease, everyone is a winner.
Chronic Disease Management Example: Diabetes
A good example of this is diabetes – if you don’t manage a patient with diabetes properly, their diabetes will get worse, and over a number of years, they may end up with kidney failure, blindness, heart attacks, strokes, gangrene of the legs and so on which will result in being hospitalised.
If we treat a patient’s diabetes and get their sugars under good control, we can stop them from getting most of these things and reduce unnecessary hospitalisation.
Clearly, this is very good news for the patient (as it stops their lives from being hampered by illness, infirmity and disability), but it’s also good for the NHS in general because the cost of treating these complications and subsequent hospitalisation would otherwise be very expensive.
Examples of Chronic Disease
- Hypertension (high blood pressure)
- Angina/Heart Attacks
- Heart Failure
- Strokes
- Diabetes
- Asthma
- COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease)
- Renal (Kidney) Failure
- Osteoporosis
- Cancer Care
- Drug & Alcohol misuse
- Mental Health Disorders like Depression, Anxiety, Bipolar disease, Schizophrenia and so on
It is essential for children to be fully immunised and we advise that current Department of Health recommendations should be strictly adhered to.
This means:
- A full course of three doses of polio, pneumococcal, tetanus, diphtheria, whooping cough,
- HiB (Meningitis) and meningitis C vaccines monthly from the post-natal visit at two months,
- Measles mumps and rubella at fourteen months and booster diphtheria, tetanus, and polio at four and fourteen years.
- In addition, MMR II is given also at the age of four or fourteen.
Bookings for vaccinations and immunisations can be made by calling the practice.
Invitations to attend are sent automatically by the Health Authority who maintain the database of childhood immunisation.
The aim of the NHS Cervical Screening Programme is to reduce the number of women who develop cervical cancer and the number of women who die from the condition. Since the screening programme was introduced in the 1980s, the number of cervical cancer cases has decreased by about 7% each year.
Being screened regularly means any abnormal changes in the cells of the cervix can be identified at an early stage and, if necessary, treated to stop cancer developing. However, cervical screening isn’t 100% accurate and doesn’t prevent all cases of cervical cancer.
Screening is a personal choice and you have the right to choose not to attend.
All women who are registered with a GP are invited for cervical screening:
- aged 25 to 49 – every three years
- aged 50 to 64 – every five years
- over 65 – only women who haven’t been screened since age 50 or those who have recently had abnormal tests
Further Information:
At the Beaumont Practice, we offer the following vaccines to adults:
Vaccines for ‘at-risk’ people:
- Flu jab
- Chickenpox vaccine
- BCG (TB) vaccine
- Flu jab for pregnant women
- Whooping cough vaccine for pregnant women
- Hepatitis B vaccine for at-risk patients
- MMR for non-immune adults
- Men ACWY vaccine for students
Vaccines for over-65s:
- Pneumococcal PPV vaccine
- Annual flu vaccine
Vaccines for 70s:
- Shingles vaccine
- Flu vaccine