About Hackney
 Hackney is an area full of fascination and interest; it stretches from the City in the South,borders the borough of Islington,and spreads up to Haringey in the North. It has a rich cultural diversity and because of this mixed community it is a rewarding place in which to work and live. As someone once said, it has the diversity of New York without the ghettos.
Hackney is close to the centre of town with all that Central London can offer. It is about 10 minutes from the City and also has a number of its own shopping experiences such as Ridley Road Market for fruit and vegetables and Columbia Road for plants and flowers on a Sunday morning. In short Hackney does not deserve the bad press it often gets, and is in fact possibly the trendiest borough in London! It has much to offer and allows those that like city life to both give something to the community and benefit from working and living in one of the most exiting cities in the world.
Hackney is predominantly a deprived inner city area with high unemployment of 22% - (greater London as a whole is only 11%). There is a high percentage of households without a car (one of the Jarman indices of poverty) and also high numbers of single parent families and residents that are deemed long term ill.
 Asthma and anorexia, chronic fatigue and chronic housing and social problems present alongside TB and malaria. The needs of the indigenous population, the wealthier incomers and those of the refugee (who may well have suffered torture and imprisonment in their homeland) all have to be met, often in the space of the same morning surgery. Not only are there high levels of physical morbidity but psychological morbidity too. East London and the City has high levels of mental illness compared with other areas of the UK. Several socio-economic features contribute to this- including the high rate of unemployment, social deprivation, social isolation and poor housing.
All of this means that to work as a GP in Hackney one needs a wide range of skills to deal with the huge diversity of types of people and problems; you never know what will come through the door.
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