Imperial College London Primary Care

Academic specialty trainee year four general practice posts  provide an opportunity for GP registrars to develop academic skills. The two posts based in the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College offer five sessions in a local general practice (four clinical, one non-clinical) and five academic sessions. You can read the views of two of our recent Academic ST4 doctors in two articles published in the BMJ Careers Focus. The first article describes the scheme and the second article describes Amanda Allen's and Anna Whiteford's experience of their time in the ST4 post.

New General Practice at a Glance textbook Undergraduate teachers in the department have been commissioned to write the general practice edition of the highly popular “At a Glance” series of medical text books published by Wiley-Blackwell . The series is aimed at medical students, junior doctors and allied health professionals, and breaks down complex subjects into a series of illustrated two-page spreads. Consultant editors Dr Paul Booton, Dr Margaret Harper, Dr Carol Cooper and Dr Graham Easton are co-ordinating the project, and aiming for publication in 2011. Imperial College teachers run RCGP course in China Imperial College GP teachers Dr Frances Carter, Dr Richard Hooker and Dr Graham Easton have just returned from a successful visit to Zhejiang Province in China where they ran a RCGP course on clinical communication for local Chinese family practitioners.  The visit built on the work of Dr Grant Blair acting in his capacity as RCGP China liaison fellow. Clinical comm...

Sunday November 14 is World Diabetes Day . The number of people suffering from diabetes is increasing across the world and diabetes is now recognised as a global epidemic. There are currently about 200 million people worldwide with diabetes and this number may is predicted to increase to around 330 million by 2025. In the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College, we have an active research, quality improvement and education programmes in diabetes. In research, we have worked with a number of our local primary care organisations to improve the prevention, early detection and treatment of diabetes. Examples of this work include QOF Plus (Hammersmith & Fulham), Vascular Risk Assessment (Ealing) and CONDUIT (Wandsworth). The department also provides primary care advice to the Diabetes Research Network .

One of the members of the department, Dr Utz Pape , was the co-author of a paper published recently in the lading scientific journal Nature . In the paper, Dr Pape and his colleagues investigated the link between a genetically-linked enzyme defect and myeloid cancers.

Congratulations to Dr Josip Car and his team at NHS Hammersmith & Fulham for their work on the QOF Plus programme, which won the Award for Primary Care and Community Based Integration at the 2010 London Health and Social Care Awards. QOF Plus was developed jointly by the eHealth Unit at the Department of Primary Care and Public Health at Imperial and NHS Hammersmith and Fulham. QOF Plus adopts a multi-modal approach based on: Strong clinical leadership and shared ownership through clinical engagement and stakeholder panels Targeted training and support  Innovative funding, financial and other incentives  Rigorous concurrent evaluation which feeds into constant self-improvement of the programme Competitive motivation using dedicated software analysis tools to allow regular performance review, benchmarking and prediction of end-of-year performance Patient-level management tools to assist practices in identifying those patients that may be missing out ...

Enquiries from prospective PhD students are welcome in any of the areas of research carried out in the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College London. The department is part of the School of Public Health . We have a highly active and wide-ranging research programmes in public health and primary care. This includes collaborative work with UK and international organisations. Current and past PhD students have undertaken studies on a wide range of projects, including prescribing policy in Thailand; obesity management in Brunei; health care equity; deaths from drug overdose; the impact of pay for performance schemes on quality of care; ethnic and socio-economic differences in the management of diabetes and its complications; screening for diabetes and other chronic diseases; the use of new technology to improve health care; the epidemiology and management of diabetes in the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council; medical ethics; and the epidemiology ...

All academic staff have an Imperial College London publications page, which lists recently published papers. Looking at these pages is a useful way of seeing what areas research academics in the department are currently undertaking. As an example, you can view Professor Majeed's Imperial College London Publications Page .

The SAPC’s annual meeting of academic departments of general practice and primary care from London and the South East is a longstanding fixture in the academic calendar. The  2011 Meeting  will be held from February 4-6 at Madingley Hall, Cambridge. The meeting is organised by the departments of primary care in the five main London medical schools. The 2011 meeting is being organised by the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College London. For the 2011, our guest speakers include  Dr Fiona Godlee  (Editor of the BMJ),  Professor Jan De Maeseneer  (Professor of Family Medicine at the University of Ghent in Belgium)< and  Dr Roger Kneebone  from the Department of Surgery & Cancer at Imperial College London. The meeting offers a good opportunity to present any research, development or teaching work that you have carried out in primary care. See the  2011 Meeting Website  for further details.

Dr Sarvesh Saini has been appointed as Head of Year 3 Undergraduate Medical Teaching. Sarvesh will undertake this role jointly with Professor Alun Davies. Sarvesh is a GP who, in addition to being involved in teaching and examining students, is Course Lead for Clinical Methods Teaching .

The 2010 Sir Brian Jarman Prize for the best Academic F2 project was won by Dr Shonella Singh for her project  Interventions to optimise prescribing in care homes: a systematic review . This is an important topic because of the increasing number of older people who live in care homes. It is important that prescribing for this group of people is done to a high-standard to ensure that patients receive the drugs they need to improve their health and to reduce the risk of suffering adverse drug reactions.

Helen Atherton and Robert de Vries were awarded the prizes for the best PhD student presentations at the recent Annual School of Public Health PhD Student Research Symposium.

Our Seminar this week was given given by Dr Bryan English, Chief Medical Officer for Chelsea Football Club , the recent winners of the Premier League and FA Cup. Dr English qualified in Medicine at Sheffield University in 1986 and has been the Chief Medical Officer for Chelsea FC since 1995, overseeing a medical team of 21 people. Dr English has also worked within the NHS for 13 years, with the last 6 of these as a Consultant in Orthopaedic& Musculoskeletal Medicine in Sheffield and Leeds. He previously worked as CMO for Judo before moving to UK Athletics in 1997. He has worked over 2 Olympiads with UKA before going full time into Sports Medicine in 2000 for The Sydney Olympics. Following the Athens Olympics, he moved into professional football. Dr English spoke about the challenges in providing medical care and health promotion to a group of elite footballers. 

Congratulation to Paul Booton on his appointment as Chair of the Year 5 Examination Board.

On behalf of the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College, I would like to congratulate the players and staff of our local football team, Chelsea FC , for winning the "Double". Winning both the Premier League title and the FA Cup in the same season is a tremendous achievement. The way in which premier league footballers keep themselves fit and healthy through their carefully planned programme of exercise and diet is a great example to people of all ages. We are facing an epidemic of obesity and diabetes brought about through high-calorie diets and a lack of exercise. Let's hope that more people will try to follow the example of our local footballers and aim to keep themselves in good physical shape.

This week's seminar was given by Professor Derek Bell, who spoke on the NW London CLAHRC programme. The North-West London CLAHRC is an alliance of academic and healthcare organisations working to develop and promote a more efficient, accelerated and sustainable uptake of clinically innovative and cost-effective research interventions into patient care. Patients expect high standards of care and treatment wherever and whenever they access the NHS. There is a need for new evidence to be implemented more rapidly to deliver better care and better outcomes. The Cooksey report identified the implementation of new products and approaches into clinical practice as the second gap in the translation of health research and called for a systematic approach to the adoption of new interventions. The High Level Group Report on Clinical Effectiveness (2007) identified a number of the challenges facing the successful implementation of effective and efficient clinical care. These include iden...

Today's seminar was given by Dr Veena Raleigh from the Kings Fund. A summary of Dr Raleigh's presentation is given below. Quality has been at the centre of recent NHS policy, and the NHS Next Stage Review highlighted the role of information and measurement in supporting quality improvement, particularly in relation to patient safety, clinical effectiveness and patient experience. It is therefore important to be clear how quality can be measured and by whom – and how the information can be used to improve services. If quality measurement is going to have greatest impact, all those involved – policy-makers, commissioners, board members, managers and clinicians – need to be aware of the opportunities and challenges it presents. Understanding how to produce good indicators of quality is only the first step; what is critical is having systems in place to make use of the information to improve patient care. This will be particularly important in the current economic climate, which pu...

This Week's Seminar will be given by Dr Veena Raleigh from the Kings Fund. Dr Raleigh will speak on Quality Measurement: the potential and the perils . The seminar will be held on on 28th April 2010 at 12.30pm in the Seminar Room, 3rd Floor, Reynolds Building, Charing Cross Campus. All welcome.

An opportunity has arisen for either a Research Assistant or Research Associate to join an international/cross-discipline team creating a rapid learning health care system to improve patient safety and volume of clinical research in Europe. This is an exciting opportunity for an individual with a keen interest in data mining and/or data provenance who is looking to gain experience in medical informatics. The aim of the research is to design and develop an extensible provenance framework to be integrated into the decision support and data mining engines to ensure auditability and accountability. This position will be responsible for investigating existing provenance models and their applicability to data mining tasks and contributing to the development of novel data mining models for translational data. See the Imperial College Recruitment Page for further details.

Imperial College allows all staff members to keep web pages on the Imperial College website to store information about professional activities. As examples, you can view my Imperial College page and my Imperial College Publications page.

It was with great sadness that we learned about the recent death of Professor Konrad Jamrozik. Konrad Jamrozik was Professor of Primary Care Epidemiology at Imperial College London from 2001-2004. He then returned to Australia. His most recent post was as Head of the School of Population Health and Clinical Practice at the University of Adelaide. Professor Jamrozik won a number of awards during his career, most recently, the Nigel Gray Award for Achievement in Tobacco Control.

Ms Joanna Murray, a PhD student in the department, has been awarded a place on the NIHR Biomedical Research Centres Summer School for PhD Students.

Students from the MPH and MSc Modern Epidemiology have started the International Public Health Group to improve awareness and discussion of global health issues. The group will also provide opportunities to learn about international projects and organizations. For example, with the help of Professor Salman Rawaf, the group has arranged a visit to the WHO Headquarters in Geneva. In addition to sessions with Professor Rawaf, the group has also organised sessions with Professor Alan Fenwick and Dr Edwin Michaels from the Department of Infectious Diseases Epidemiology.

Our lunchtime seminar this week was given by Helen Lester, Professor of Primary Care at the National Primary Care Research and Development Centre at the University of Manchester. She has been a GP in Birmingham since 1990. Most of her academic work has focused on improving care for people with mental health problems and on quality improvement more generally. Professor Lester is also the academic clinical lead of the Quality and Outcomes Framework (working as the external contractor to NICE), vice chair of the Society for Academic Primary Care and an elected member of College Council. In her spare time, she writes for the British Journal of General Practice as one of the ‘back page’ columnists. Professor Lester spoke about the benefits that we have seen in health care delivery in the UK from the implementation of the Quality and Outcomes Framework. These include a reduction in health inequalities .

The department hosted a visit this week by a delegation from Singapore, with help from the Lillie Road Surgery. The visit was to discuss collaboration between Singapore and Imperial College in the areas of undergraduate education and research.