Healthwatch Meets... George Verghese
At Healthwatch Lambeth, we believe that knowing the people behind health and social care services helps foster trust and an awareness of how these services work on your behalf. For this reason, we're going to be speaking to several health and social care professionals in the borough over the coming months to learn about the challenges we face and the areas where we're seeing improvements.
This week, we spoke to Dr George Verghese. A GP and Co-Chair of the Lambeth Clinical Cabinet, George is also a member of the Lambeth Together leadership team.
Hi George, please tell us a little bit about yourself
I've been a GP in Lambeth since 2010 and my main role is as a GP partner at the Waterloo Health Centre. In 2019, I became clinical director of the North Lambeth Primary Care Network of GP practices. I am also Co-Chair of Lambeth Clinical Cabinet which is a collaborative forum of Lambeth GP groups.
The Lambeth Clinical Cabinet was formed to provide a coherent and united primary care voice in the Lambeth health and social care system. It was pivotal in Lambeth’s COVID-19 pandemic response. I was also the clinical lead at one of England’s first GP COVID-19 vaccine centres.
What do you think are the current challenges in Lambeth's healthcare system?
We're always asking ourselves how we can deliver care as effectively and as joined up as possible. I'm glad to say that mature conversations are taking place within the system as to how we're doing this.
People know about the challenges faced by healthcare services, including staff numbers and the exhaustion following the Covid-19 pandemic.
But we're more engaged in systems working than ever before, which I'm glad to see, and those conversations I mentioned are, I hope, going to deliver real improvements in how we provide care in Lambeth.
How does your work fit in with the five new priorities set out by South-East London ICS?
Our work in Lambeth is definitely supporting The South East London Strategic priorities especially around the priority concerning Primary care and people with long term conditions. We are working hard to gain more alignment and less duplication in our workstreams.
People should be confident that different services are able to communicate effectively with one another when delivering care (for example, a GP surgery and the hospital) and as I said before, we're having mature, productive conversations about how to improve this. I think we're moving in the right direction.
