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Family Practice Gets Financial Boost From Hair Salon

Family Practice Gets Financial Boost From Hair Salon

A local family practice has received a welcome financial boost thanks to staff and customers at The Leading Edge Hair & Beauty Salon. The salon with branches in Hyde and Stockport held a bazaar evening and a raffle to fundraise for the Alvanley Family Practice in Woodley.

Leading Edge owners Alan Havery and Barrie Aitken presented a cheque for £500 to grateful members of the Family Practice.

Speaking about the charity efforts Alan said; “We work with local charities each year and this year we came across the Family Practice Champions. They have a unique proposition helping people in the community by doing things nobody has ever done. We like innovation and we thought we must support these guys.”

Alan Barrie and their staff at The Leading Edge are planning to raise a further £500 before the year is out, much to the delight of Dave Chorlton who is chair of Alvanley Family Practice Health Champions.

The Champions were formed 12 months ago. Explaining why, Dave said; “The NHS is in crisis. Part of the problem is not enough money to go around. What they’ve recognised is that probably one third of patients that go to the GP these days are going for unnecessary reasons. What they decided to do is send out a circular 12 months ago to see if anyone would be interested in forming a patient participation group. We called it the Health Champions. We’re completely autonomous from the practice and basically instead of somebody going to their GP when they are lonely we needed to come up with other solutions.”

The Health Champions have produced a list of over a dozen activities to improve the mental and physical well-being of patients at Alvanley Family Practice, such as a pram pushers walk for mothers and their babies, a sing-a-long group and a knit and natter group.

“All our members have had the various relevant training.” Dave said, “Some of our members phone up vulnerable patients just to chat and that might be the only phone call they get all week. We’ve got an allotment which is exciting. There is a lot of stuff going on.”

For more information on the Alvanley Family Practice Health Champions and their various activities you can email stoocg.healthchampions@nhs.net

Published: 24/03/18

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