Imperial College London Primary Care

Dr Sonia Saxena was interviewed in an ITV documentary on 5th September 2013, Tonight: The Unhealthy Generation . One in three British children are either overweight or obese and experts predict that by 2050 obesity will cost the NHS upwards of £50 billion. The Tonight programme asks if enough is being done to combat the childhood obesity epidemic?

We are looking to increase community-based teaching opportunities for medical students at Imperial College. This would be part of a long-term objective to shift more of our teaching to the community to reflect the current and future delivery of NHS services. As a first step, we would like to carry out a scoping exercise to identify community-based clinics (e.g. cardiology, diabetes, dermatology) and also services for unplanned care (e.g. urgent care centres). We would then like to discuss whether any of these settings would be suitable for teaching Imperial medical students and whether the clinics & CCGs would be willing to facilitate this process.

The department has been awarded a Strategic Grant by Arthritis Research UK (ARUK) to take forward its “ MSK (musculoskeletal) Calculator ” initiative. The overall aim of the project is to develop four (osteoarthritis, rheumatoid arthritis, back pain and high fracture risk) estimates of prevalence and need for healthcare at general practice and small resident population levels, and to relate this to actual and expected activity and costs, and where possible intervention thresholds and cost-effectiveness. The Grant, for which the department will receive a total of £180K over the next year, will enable ARUK to disseminate the models in useful formats through its website and other national information portals. The department has wide experience in developing chronic disease prevalence models, having been funded for this purpose by the Department of Health, the Association of Public Health Observatories/Public Health England, the Care Quality Commission and Alzheimer’s Research UK. These m...