Living with Epilepsy

Epilepsy is an important condition that has the ability to damage people’s lives. We at Avenue House Surgery would like to help you minimise the problems of the condition and assist you in leading a full and active life. We would like to help you to exploit the full potential within your life. We have outlined below the service available at the Practice and hopefully point you towards useful national resources that give you the information that you need.

The Offer

We will offer all patients with the diagnosis of epilepsy an opportunity for an Annual Review. Patients will receive a questionnaire and we would be grateful if you would return this to the Practice as it keeps our information up to date and can give us some background information prior to any consultations. Many people with epilepsy have been stable for a number of years and do not feel any real need to visit the Surgery to discuss the issue. We fully understand this and are very happy with this decision but would certainly want to make the offer. When you attend the Surgery we will make available a selection of patient information leaflets and also information on how to access any important Websites. Please ask our reception staff for this resource, you may wish to look through the information whilst in our waiting area.

The main local service we use are the Consultant Neurologists with a special interest in epilepsy based in Sheffield but they do have a Clinic available at Chesterfield Royal Hospital once a week. These Consultants are obviously very skilled and can be especially helpful in the difficult areas of diagnosis and the use of the best drugs available. Attached to this Unit there are epilepsy Nurse Specialists who can be very helpful with the more practical day-to-day advice issues. Unfortunately we have to acknowledge that there is not enough time available in this speciality and waiting times to see Consultants can be prolonged.

National Society for Epilepsy

We fully recommend that you become familiar with the National Society for Epilepsy Website which has a mass of information which is both very practical in helping you make life decisions and ensure that epilepsy does not dominate your life but also has good detail explaining the condition, diagnosis and drugs. We would especially recommend the section on information on Living with Epilepsy which is very comprehensive and helpful.