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 ...