# @royalcollegeofgps on Instagram

- **Type:** Image
- **Original URL:** https://www.instagram.com/p/C8Up96XqUeH
- **Gondola URL:** https://gondola.cc/posts/19275862-royalcollegeofgps-instagram
- **Thumbnail:** https://img.gondola.cc/tr:w-,h-,fo-auto/thumbnails/49e7f7bae5.jpg
- **Posted:** 2024-06-17T16:01:19.000+00:00
- **Account Owner:** Royal College of GPs (@royalcollegeofgps) — https://gondola.cc/royalcollegeofgps

## Caption

Dr Alex Turnbull is a third year GP Trainee with a MSc in Tropical Medicine and International Health, working in Scotland. She spoke to us about the work her practice is doing to support asylum seekers.

“Our small practice in West Lothian is one of the first GP practices to register an entire hotel housing up to 120 asylum seekers as new patients, at fairly short notice and with little guidance given this hadn’t been done In West Lothian before.

I have an interest in Global Health and Tropical Medicine and had spent 3 months working with refugees in Greece so led our practice response to reduce the health inequalities that refugees and migrants often face.

Within the first few months we, with a lot of help from the wider NHS Lothian team, were involved in managing health outbreaks within the hotel, offered comprehensive health screening to all our new patients (including screening for infectious diseases such as Tuberculosis), organised vaccination counselling and provision and liaised with secondary care to set up new referral pathways to make sure our patients received the healthcare they needed. I also did a wider talk to our colleagues raising awareness of the many challenges migrants and refugees may face when trying to access healthcare and how this can directly impact their health.

We used various online resources including the RCGP ‘Resources for Migrant Health’, reached out to other health boards who had more experience in migrant health than ourselves and were guided by secondary care colleagues including Infectious Disease with regards to our health screening questionnaire and programme.

It’s been an interesting, challenging and busy few months as I was initially shocked at how unprepared our system was to accommodate our new patients, but I have really enjoyed working with a collection of extremely helpful and motivated people to have felt like we are making progress and changes within our system."

#RefugeeWeek #TeamGP

## Stats

- **Views:** 0
- **Likes:** 208
- **Shares:** 0
- **Comments:** 12

## Tags

refugeeweek, teamgp

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