Burnham Health Centre

Healthy living

Keeping healthy with local support

The good news is you can do a significant amount yourself to keep healthy without necessarily needing to attend your GP practice. There is excellent local support which you can access directly yourself (self-referral) including for:

Adopting lifestyle changes
It is important to acknowledge that changing any habit is not easy for any of us. Individually understanding how we can achieve any change on a permanent basis is an important step forward. There is more on this under Lifestyle changes.

There are some other steps which you can consider:

An attention to mental, social and physical wellbeing can make a real difference.

Wellbeing

These areas should not necessarily be seen as separate, so for example joining a walking club can provide exercise which can help with mental wellbeing and give you the opportunity to meet other people.

Vaccinations (including flu)
Vaccinations can have an important protective effect if recommended. There is information on

Screening
Many of the screening services take place outside the practice (e.g., bowel screening). You can access bowel, breast, and aortic aneuysm screening if you have been recommended any of these and missed your opportunity, see under Screening.

We provide some screening services including cervical screening (please see more on support for Cervical screening) and the NHS Health Check We also offer an annual health check for people with learning disabilities (see under Vulnerable People for full details).

Reduce your risk of ...

The Reduce your risk of… series covers how you can reduce the risk associated with a number of common conditions which includes medical conditions but also events such as falls and accidents.

The ingredients of this series include the healthy living approach suggested above, but there are some important additional ideas. So, for example under stroke you will find how learning a very simple technique can help to reduce the risk of having a certain type of stroke. There is information on how your home can be made safer to reduce your chance of a fall or accident. Steps that can be taken to prevent 4 out of every 10 cancers ever occurring are covered.

All of this can mostly be achieved either in your home environment or with local support you can access without you needing to attend your GP practice.

Quality care checklists and local support

Quality care checklists are a form with a series of health questions and answers but unlike many forms, checklists are not submitted back to the practice when you complete them. They are for your own use to help you develop a better understanding of some of the benefits of tackling lifestyle risk factors and what local support is available to help you.

Living longer better - a long term vision for your health

The vision of wellbeing and disease prevention held by many medical leaders is covered in the Live Longer Better campaign which includes reference to the successful blue zones across the world.

Wellbeing and disease prevention - an overview

The is an overview of Wellbeing and Disease Prevention. This includes a link to population health management which is an important trend in health thinking.

Videos and podcasts

Many people prefer to see a video or listen to a podcast as it offers a different way to understand health information. On the videos and podcasts page there are links to some relevant videos and podcasts covering various topics relating to wellbeing and disease prevention covering many aspects of healthy living.

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