A husband and wife team have set up a unique health centre on the Newcastle Quayside in the hope of combining decades of NHS experience with a range of complementary therapies to support people to "stay well".
Heaton -based Dr Ceri Sutherland and Dr Riaan Swanepoel both continue to work in the NHS, but they've set up the IDOS community wellbeing centre in St Peter's Basin and want to engage with "every section of society" to provide healthcare, therapies such as massages, Shiatsu and acupuncture, and programmes of advice on topics like sleep and diet.
Dr Sutherland told ChronicleLive that the idea was to try to think about health more proactively.
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"We've both worked in the NHS for a long time and we are great fans of the NHS, but Covid has really shone a spotlight on how we work and how we can work in the community.
"It helped us to step back. Obviously being a GP my husband couldn't see patients face-to-face, I couldn't do sleep clinics face to face - and we really felt that we needed that physical connection with patients that we couldn't have.
"Following on from that is the realisation that, as doctors, a lot of what we do is much more than just giving out pills."
The medic - who continues to work for the NHS in Teesside - said she wanted to help provide people with the knowledge and advice to avoid becoming ill in the first place.
"Often patients turn up at the doctors when they are already very ill and you are catching up for lost time," she said. "They needed support earlier.
"And one of the messages I sometimes get from patients is that they're in a position where they feel they need to change their approach to their health - so we know people realise this."
Saying that she had always been supportive of things like acupuncture as complements to western medicine, Dr Sutherland added that her husband's experience setting up private GP services at the Nuffield in Newcastle had shown him the value of offering longer appointments.
"He felt that seeing patients for longer meant he was able to help them exponentially more. "
IDOS is a community interest company - and Dr Sutherland said being involved in the local area and working with charities and the NHS to help keep people healthy was a key aim.
"We want to give people the option of seeing us because they want to stay well - and we want to do that in a way that the whole of society can access. We want this to be open to everybody," she said.
"We want to help people to get their health right earlier - I think sometimes people struggle to imagine what not being well is like.
"Our social objective is to provide this holistic healthcare approach to every section of society. We are smack-bang between Wallsend, Walker and Byker and we are trying to reach out to community groups here that we can work with to provide programmes with.
"I feel we can approach health both from the bottom up and the top down."
IDOS - which is based overlooking the Tyne - offers "a combination of medical, social and behavioural prescribing", and Dr Sutherland explained that, in addition to having a community GP on site, it also offered medical specialities like sleep medicine, gynaecology and rheumatology.
Therapies like nutrition, yoga, acupuncture and Shiatsu massage are also offered.
Dr Sutherland added: "The complementary therapies that we offer are low risk and increasingly recognised to be good for our health; getting our sleep right improves health, and dietary approaches can cure some illnesses such as type 2 diabetes. We know that nothing works in silo and our unique mix of skills can help us approach health problems from a number of different ways.
"Covid-19 has made us all think differently about our health and wellbeing, and it has been a long road to opening our doors here in Newcastle. The team are incredibly excited to start meeting our communities and working with them to develop bespoke health options that work for them and their families."
