Imperial College London Primary Care

Congratulations to Dr Carol Cooper , Dr Graham Easton , and Margaret Harper from the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College London who, along with Paul Booton from SGUL, won First Prize in the Primary Health Care Section of the 2013 BMA Book Awards for their text book “General Practice at a Glance”. As well as the four editors, there were 21 other Imperial GP Teachers (either college staff or honorary teachers) who contributed at least one chapter to the book. The BMA Medical Book Awards take place annually to recognise outstanding contributions to the medical literature. More than 640 books were entered for the awards this year with prizes awarded in 21 categories. The judging panel awards prizes on the basis of books’ applicability to audience, production quality and originality. Prizes were presented by Professor Steve Field, Deputy National Medical Director of Health Inequalities NHS England. “ We wanted to write a really useful text book that r...

The Department’s Undergraduate GP Teaching Unit consists of over 25 staff with course leads, teaching fellows, and administrators. It is led by Dr Sonia Kumar, Director of Undergraduate Primary Care Education and Dr Jo Harris, the Deputy Director. It is one of the most active and innovative teaching teams in the Faculty of Medicine, with around 300 community GP teachers providing teaching for hundreds of students every year and it achieves some of the highest feedback ratings from students in the Medical school. And there are exciting developments on the horizon. Across all years, the GP Teaching Unit delivers about 13% of the entire undergraduate medical curriculum. Core GP-based teaching is focused on two three-week attachments in years 5 and 6, basic history-taking and examination skills in year 3, and a chance to follow patients early on in year 1 in the First Clinical Attachment. The Department also leads on teaching on clinical consultation skills, using video and simulated ac...

The Annual Athena SWAN Lecture organised by Imperial College London's School of Public Health took place on 11 September 2013. Professor Dame Val Beral from Oxford University spoke on ‘ What women can do to stay healthy '. With a lecture theatre filled to capacity, and a keen audience ready to take on board her advice, Dame Val Beral gave her tips on how women can stay healthy. These included: Don’t smoke; give up if you do Keep your weight down Breastfeed if you have children Exercise regularly Drink as little alcohol as possible Eat plenty of fruit and vegetables Take the pill, but stop before age 40 years Take hormone replacement therapy (HRT) as little as possible You can watch the  video of Professor Beral's lecture

The Dr Foster Unit welcomes Dr Alice King, who joined in August as a Research Associate. Her background is in clinical neuroscience and her area of interest is improving risk benefit ratios in healthcare. Within the Unit she will start by analysing and investigating Medicare data to assist in exploring variations in service quality and to summarise variations in US hospital care. In September, Dr Alex Bottle attended the IEEE International Conference on Healthcare Informatics in Philadelphia, PA where he presented at the International Workshop on Hospital Readmissions The Dr Foster Unit made a strong showing at ISQua’s 30th International Conference which took place in Edinburgh from 13-16 October. Dr Milagros Ruiz presented a poster on her work on the impact of the 2012 doctors’ strike, Dr Alex Bottle presented a poster and a talk on patient and hospital predictors of readmission in heart failure and Dr Paul Aylin presented posters on adverse events recorded in English Primary Car...

Patients with Sickle Cell Disease living in more deprived areas are more likely to be admitted to hospital again according to a recent study by AlJuburi and colleagues . Taking data from Hospital Episode Statistics , the study followed up almost 8,000 patients admitted to hospital for SCD in 2005/06 for the next five years. The study also found that patients in more deprived areas were more likely to die over the period. Sickle Cell Disease is known to be a cause of frequent hospitalisation and previous work by the same authors described rising trend of admissions in England . Readmissions to hospital are however, considered to be a better marker of the quality of care in this population and this study gives information on which groups are at greatest risk of poor outcomes. As well as providing an epidemiology of hospital readmissions, this study suggests that targeted interventions aimed at people at high risk of readmission may be effective in improving both quality of care a...