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Showing posts from November, 2012

Undergraduate Education Update

Year 3 has seen an increase in intake which means it now has over 400 students compared to around 340 in Year 1. This increase in student numbers has meant recruiting even more GP tutors to teach, adding to the many already in use, some of whom are stationed as far as Shetland. More patients have been recruited for Year 1’s First Clinical Attachment which gives first year students the opportunity to meet patients and hear their experiences with long term care. We publicised the programme through flyers/posters, which were sent to contacts and advertised in healthcare publications/magazines and so far the response has been excellent. On another, sadder note, Kate Woodhouse, our Primary Care Undergraduate Education Manager, will be leaving the department in October. Kate has worked for Imperial College for 12 years and has been here with us at the department for 8 of those, racking up a colossal amount of knowledge and experience which has been an invaluable asset to our department.

Update from Dr Foster Unit

Milagros Ruiz has joined the Unit as a Research Associate. Originally an astrophysicist, Milagros has recently completed a Master’s degree at the University of Essex on Statistics and Data Analysis with a focus on Statistical Quality Control. Within the Unit, she will initially be looking at comparing out of hospital mortality rates in the UK, USA and other European countries. The aim is to shed light on the relationship between in-hospital mortality rates and lengths of stay. Carmen Tsang attended the LINNEAUS EURO-PC conference at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt on the 18 and 19 of September. Having attended a LINNEAUS project start-up meeting in 2009, this was an opportunity to learn about the final results of the 12 partner collaboration on patient safety in primary care, which is funded by the European Union Framework 7 Programme. The conference was led by Professor Aneez Esmail at University of Manchester who is the Director of one of the two newly funded N

Media mentions

A study led by William Palmer on access to treatments, and outcomes, for stroke patients admitted at the weekend appeared on the front page of the Telegraph and was also featured on Radio 4 in July. William is a part-time PhD student based at the Dr Foster Unit, and his research focuses on the feasibility of using administrative data to evaluate the quality and safety of hospital care. The paper confirmed previous international studies which suggested poorer outcomes for patients admitted at weekends but extended the existing analyses by providing explanations for why this might be happening, including access to specialist staff and urgent treatments. He hopes that the results will help accelerate the shift towards providing a more consistent level of NHS care to emergency patients across all days of the week. 

Dr Roger Neighbour

We are delighted to report that Dr Roger Neighbour, past President of the RCGP and author of The Inner Consultation, has been working with the department both as a tutor for Year 5 departmental teaching sessions, and to help support and develop our departmental tutors for the Year 5 consultation skills sessions. So far we have had an interesting workshop exploring a new model of feedback for video consultations; the “windows method” originally described by Professor Colin Coles from University of Winchester and subsequently developed by a Scandinavian group led by Danish GP Jan-Helge Larsen. We are now testing it out with students to see how it works in practice. Roger will be holding further workshops in the department, and we hope to make some available to community GP teachers too.