Health Check

A couple of weeks ago, I got a letter from my local GP, asking me to go in for an “NHS Health Check”. It was a bit annoying, as the accompanying leaflet said that my surgery ‘needed to update their records as I hadn’t been in for so long’ and so on. Considering I was in there for a check in November 2014, that was kind of worrying – implying that my records weren’t up to date and so on.

Anyway, they then called me up to chase getting an appointment, and today I went in. It wasn’t anything special, but still, always good to know what’s going on.

It turns out that what they meant was that this Health Check thing needs records less than three months old – which is understandable, things can change in that time. But it would’ve been good if their own bumf had actually said so, rather than implying that the record-keeping at the surgery was bad.

Still, onwards and upwards.

The Health Check is basically a quick check of the key figures: weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, cholesterol and the like, as well as various health factors (smoking, drinking, activity etc.) and comes out with a ‘risk’ factor at the end of it.

All told, the figures came out pretty well :

• blood pressure was fine at 130/80,
• blood sugar was fine – although I can’t remember the exact figure, it was well within acceptable limits
• cholesterol came in at 4.5 (anything under 5 is regarded as ‘good’) with ‘good’ cholesterol of 1.8
• weight is still ‘too high’, but has kept on coming down, so *shrug*

The final “risk factor” figure was 4 – which supposedly means I have a 4% risk of suffering a heart attack in the next ten years. They’re happy with anything under 10, so I shouldn’t need to darken the surgery’s door on that score for a while.

Obviously I’m going to keep on working on losing weight, and being healthier/fitter, but having a quick summary like that is good for pointing out that I’m not doing too bad, and could be doing one hell of a lot worse than I am. I can live with that, to be fair.