.. and it's Goodbye from him

After over 31 years at the practice, Dr Davidson has retired.

Dear Patient

I joined Dr Peter Allamby on 1st August 1993 as a partner at the practice, which was then on Gomersal Lane, replacing Dr Geoff Birchall.

I’d enjoyed 5 years of hospital practice in various disciplines after qualifying in 1987, and a year of GP training with great tutors.

Last Wednesday morning, after a successful sale and transfer of the surgery premises I stood down as the practice partner and passed the helm to two doctors, husband and wife, who have taken over running the practice.

Dr Rumi Begum, who will be taking over from my clinical role in the first instance and her husband Dr Ahmed, are knowledgeable and experienced doctors, and local to our area.

They are educators and will continue and enhance our standing as a Training Practice for newly qualified GPs and lead our existing team of wonderful doctors, nurses and admin staff, which remains otherwise unchanged.

A great deal has changed since I joined in 1993, when the paper records had just been upgraded to shelves having been previously filed in shoe boxes in the back of reception!

We had taken on a computer system to keep a track of core patient details but still wrote everything in the old Lloyd George card notes.

Hazel, our senior receptionist used to write out repeat prescriptions by hand, which numbered about 30 per day. (We currently issue many hundreds of items daily).

Nearly all of our diabetics, asthmatics and high blood pressure patients were seen by consultants at the hospital (Chesterfield Royal had about only 7 Physician Consultants at the time - they now have nearly 70!)

The practice becomes ever busier.

We remain smaller than the average practice with a little over 6000 patients which helps us try and provide continuity of care by the same Dr whenever we can, but the scope of what we now manage in Primary Care has widened dramatically.

We now look after most common chronic conditions and whilst the arrival of additional community roles such as physios and pharmacists is certainly helping with the workload, it steadily grows.

Providing the quality of care that we wish to do can be a challenge under the current system but I feel we do a good job and I hope you think so too. It was a great achievement to be voted the best practice in Derbyshire in the National Patient Satisfaction Survey in 2022.

We’ve been in our super Medical Centre since 2009.

Dr Allamby & myself designed and built it, which was a great experience and I’m sure it will continue to facilitate the provision of first class care to you in the years to come.

As a Vaccination Centre during the pandemic it proved its value to the Dronfield community and has provided all that we have ever needed from it.

It has been a privilege to be your doctor over this time, and for many of you I will have also looked after your parents and grandparents and have fond memories of many of them.

Sharing with you some of the challenges that life brings, and hopefully making a positive contribution in such situations has been an honour.

I would like to particularly thank all my team colleagues who have been great to work with and have had to put up with my mind being elsewhere quite a lot recently, as work on the transfer reached its conclusion.

I wish you all happiness and good health.

Miles Davidson