Imperial College London Primary Care

Dr Matthew Harris, Clinical Lecturer in Public Health, has been successful in his application for a 2014-15 Harkness Fellowship in Health Care Policy and Practice. Dr Harris will be based at New York University for the duration of his fellowship. 

Recent research using the Health Survey for England has estimated that 5.4% of the adult English population, or 2.1 million people, are eligible for bariatric surgery . The surgery is often the last resort for people who have attempted to lose weight in other ways and who are dangerously obese.  People with a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 40 or above are eligible , as are people with a BMI of between 35 and 40 who have a condition which would be improved if they lost weight. These conditions include problems such as diabetes and high blood pressure, as well as arthritis and coronary heart disease. The paper found that about 4% of the population have a BMI between 35 and 40, and have one of these conditions, while another 1.4% people have a BMI of over 40. The surgery is known to be more effective in terms of losing weight than other strategies but the numbers of people undergoing it are far lower than this estimate of the numbers eligible. Although they have been rising rapidl...

Dr Jo Harris has been appointed as the Deputy Director in Primary Care Education in the Department Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College London. Dr Harris comments on her new role: " I am excited to be taking on the post of Deputy Director in Primary Care Education at Imperial College London, although quite daunted to be filling the shoes of Graham Easton who has been ably performing the role for the last three years. I am a general practitioner in Hammersmith and although quite new to the department I have been teaching Imperial students for 15 years. In fact I attended this medical school as a student myself so the Reynolds Building has felt like home longer than I care to remember! I am also Deputy Head of the Final Year Undergraduate Teaching at Imperial College London and together with roles in clinical communication and admissions, feel ideally placed to link the work of the Department of Primary Care with the medical school as a whole. I have recently ...

We recently ran a competition for the medical students to tell us about their top medical role models in 3 minutes. The competition was overseen by Dr Ros Herbert, GP Teaching Fellow in the Department of Primary Care & Public Health. We had videos, poems and drawings and we were incredibly impressed by the creativity of the entries. The winners were Megan Hutchingson, Lottie Whittington, Graeme Downes, Alexandra Ho and Nell Freeman. Two of the students wrote about inspirational GPs. Nell Freeman wrote about Dr Rachel Baggley, a GP who does a lot of international HIV work. "Dr Rachel Baggley is my medical role model. I met her when she was head of HIV programmes at Christian Aid and often travelling back and forth to Zimbabwe, DRC, and other conflict zones and areas of great need. She was known throughout the organization (and beyond) as someone passionate, hugely committed and KIND. She made great efforts to give younger people career opportunities that they might never h...

Medical Students’ attitudes towards General Practice and factors affecting career choice: a questionnaire study. GPs are not being recruited at rates necessary to sustain the GP workforce in England. Few newly qualified doctors specify that they want to be GPs and many choose the career late after considering other hospital specialities. The aims of this research project, which is being carried out by Dr Mydhili Chellappahy (GP Teaching Fellow), are to determine current medical students’ attitudes towards a career general practice and to identify influences on career choice and challenges to general practice recruitment. Students were recruited from all years at Imperial College Medical School. An online anonymous survey was set up and participants followed a web link to access the survey. Participants responded to a series of statements about general practice and career choice, using a Likert scale to show their degree agreement with each statement. There was also a free text opt...

The current issue of the “Journal of Global Health” features a series on mHealth (the use of  mobile devices in healthcare) . mHealth  has the potential to play an important role in low– and middle–income countries in a wide range of areas. A particular area with great potential to improve global health is using mHealth for data collection. New ideas for mHealth implementation  in this area are to validate and conduct household surveys, to monitor large–scale programs, and to measure the global burden of disease.  The first article in the mHealth Series includes the aims and objectives of an mHealth project, the field site in China, and the detailed methods of two studies.  In the second article , a conceptual model for measuring maternal, newborn and child health coverage by text messaging in China is proposed.  In the third article , the feasibility of using text messaging to collect information on infant and young child feeding practice in rural Chi...