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The Headache Clinic, York Hospital

  • Last modified date:
    9 February 2007
The clinic adopts a person-centred holistic approach to enable people to understand their symptoms so that they are able to modify their behaviour and use the most appropriate strategy to control their symptoms. The lead clinician at the clinic is a GP with a special interest in headache who works as part of a multidisciplinary team. This team includes specialist nurses, a clinical psychologist and a physiotherapist trained in Chinese medicine.

The clinic has set up a specific patient pathway for this service which includes:
(i) the initial assessment;
(ii) development of a management plan;
(iii) appropriate investigation - (notifying patients and GPs of all results) and a review of patients to an agreed time frame.

Currently 99% of review patients are seen by the specialist nurses.

The services sees people suffering from:

  • migraine;
  • chronic daily headache;
  • medication overuse headache;
  • tension-type headache;
  • cluster headache and
  • various other primary headache disorders.

Benefits of a multidisciplinary team person-centred educational approach include:

  • improved satisfaction from the individual;
  • improved compliance of the individual;
  • reduced visits to clinicians;
  • reduced costs;
  • reduced use of narcotics and
  • sustained improvement in quality of life.

For further information please contact:

Dr Manuela Fontebasso at

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