Long Term Conditions

We have introduced a new annual review recall process, which we hope will be more efficient and less time consuming for patients!

As part of the new process we’ll invite you for a Long Term Condition (LTC) annual review during your birth month. If your birthday is in April for example, you will receive an invite from the practice during that month, or before. Using your birth month makes it easier for you to predict, especially if you have more than one condition, and it’s much more efficient for our team! We will get in touch when it's time to book and ask you to complete a short questionnaire before you attend.

Depending on your conditions, it may be necessary to have more than one appointment, for example if you need a blood test prior to your visit. Most reviews will be with a member of our specialised Nursing team with knowledge and experience of managing long term conditions, however it may occasionally be necessary to also have an appointment with the GP. In some cases we may also suggest adding more frequent reviews, if this is felt to be appropriate this will be discussed with you during your appointment.

We're still in the first year of using this process, which might mean some patients are invited shortly after already having a review, or there could be a slightly longer gap between reviews, but only where it is safe to do so. Please contact us if you have any questions about LTC Reviews or if you have any feedback on how the system works for you!

What is a Long Term Condition?

Long Term Conditions (LTC) are health conditions that can impact on a person’s life, and may require ongoing care and support. While many of these conditions will not go away completly, most can usually be controlled with medicines or other treatments.

There are a wide range of conditions considered to be included, such as diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure, epilepsy, chronic pain, respiratory disease, and some mental health conditions to name a few. We also often include people at high risk of a condition developing, such as pre-diabetes.

About 15 Million people in England have at least one long-term condition, with many living with a number of conditions at the same time. If you have more one condition, this is often called "complex health needs" or "multimorbidity".

These conditions require a review once per year to ensure each condition is being managed appropriately (by you the patient and also by us as your healthcare provider) and to identify any problems or concerns. We also aim to ensure patients are confident to deal with their conditions between reviews.

What is a Review?

A Long-Term Condition Review is just how we make sure your Long-Term Condition is under control and being managed appropriately, by you and by us!

The way we do this depends on the type of long-term condition you have, but for example, we may listen to your heart, take a blood sample, check your blood pressure, ask about your lifestyle, do any tests, complete questionaires and generally check how you are, and make sure that your long-term condition isn't getting worse, and if it is, we'll talk to you about how we can help. We might talk to you about your medicines and how you are managing and perform some general wellbeing checks. Doing these reviews can help us to know how your treatments are working for you, particularly if we haven’t seen you for a while!

Sometimes we may need you to monitor something for us, such as recording your recent blood pressures or we may ask you to bring a urine sample, the contents of the reviews depend on your condition and will be discussed with you when we invite you to book.

If we invite you for a review, it doesn't mean we are worried or want to change anything, we just want to check how you are doing!

What if I don't want an LTC Review?

You don't have to attend if you don’t want to, it’s completely optional, however we do staunchly recommend attending, even if your condition is well managed.

Not only does your review help us in keeping you healthy, but yearly reviews are crucial for continuing medications, and in most cases yearly medicine reviews are a legal requirement for us to be able to continue issuing your repeat prescriptions. Because of this, if you are taking any regular repeat medicines and choose to decline your LTC Review, we may still require you to have a separate Medication Review to allow us to continue to issue these.

If you have had an invite and would prefer not to attend, please contact us to let us know that you don’t want your LTC Review, we will document this in your record and we won’t invite you again until your review is due next year. Declining your review will not negatively affect your normal medical care or your ability to book any other appointments you need.