Adding life to years and years to life – by Dr Rob Turner, GP at Topsham Surgery

This July, Northern, Eastern and Western Devon Clinical Commissioning Group is holding another health summit in Exeter for people to have their say on the future of healthcare services in the city and surrounding area.

The event takes place at St Luke’s Science and Sports College, Harts Lane, Exeter, EX1 3RD on Thursday 18 July, from 6-8pm. It follows a similar event that takes place on 3 July.

You may have heard of Yuichiro Miura’s remarkable achievement in the news recently.

Despite being 80 years old and having had four heart operations – the last one being January 2013 – the former extreme skier successfully completed his third ascent of Mount Everest in May this year.

While few of us would aspire to climb Mount Everest at any age, Mr Miura’s feat is an example of what we can do if we keep fit and well.

So what has this got to do with commissioning health care?

We want high quality, safe and sustainable health care to be available to all, well into the future.

To achieve this we believe a change in our priorities is required – instead of concentrating on illness, we want to prioritise wellness.

We know that there is a big gap in wellness between the well off and the less well off and we would like to try to close this gap.

By using digital and social media we want to inform and empower people to make the right choices for their health, from childhood to old age. This means working more closely with schools and our social care colleagues.

Social isolation, loneliness, inactivity and a poor diet are sadly commonplace in our society. These are at the root of much of our physical and mental ill health.

We need to work together to make our society more inclusive and better informed. Our biggest challenge is to try to achieve this within our existing financial resource.

There are many exciting new initiatives across the country promoting wellness and social inclusion. While most of these involve the voluntary sector, none have so far linked up with health and social care professionals to create a local facility for all to use.

We would like to help create community hubs where people can get together to share ideas and enjoy communal activities such as reading and gardening. These could be at a local library, village hall or even a pub.

Professionals could attend these centres and tend to people’s needs in a social setting. To make sure everyone can access them we need to consider help with transport for those who are less mobile. It would be good to encourage use of these centres by all generations.

You will be familiar by now with recent national media headlines about the pressures faced by the NHS and public health sources predict a continued rise in the age of our population, meaning more people will use the NHS.

We need to think creatively and do things differently to ensure provision of high quality and sustainable health and wellbeing for our communities.

We would like your help and ideas so please come along to one of our Exeter health summits.

Dr Rob Turner, GP at Topsham Surgery