Imperial College London Primary Care

The Dr Foster Unit (DFU) in the Department of Primary Care & Public Health has received funding for two exciting new projects. The first is a one-year NIHR funded project for £100,000 which will quantify the risk of non-obstetric surgery during pregnancy, allowing mothers, surgeons and anaesthetists to make better informed decisions and provide answers to questions regarding the risks involved. The second grant is also from the NIHR. This two-year grant of nearly £650,000 aims to improve the understanding of the Unit’s national hospital mortality surveillance system. It involves evaluating the impact of the alerts in reducing avoidable mortality within English NHS hospitals. Dr Rajvinder has joined the Centre for Patient Safety stream of the Unit. Her work involves developing and piloting patient safety indicators in primary care.

Dr Elizabeth Pearson from the the Fulham Medical Centre gives her perspectives on teaching medical students  I have been a partner for 10 years in a small practice with 7,000 patients in Fulham. I started undergraduate teaching almost as soon as I qualified as I felt that students get such a short time in general practice and wanted to be part of making it a positive experience. What inspired you to start teaching? We all remember a good teacher and when I was training at the Royal Free I had a fantastic placement with a GP in Yorkshire. Even though it was only for 3 weeks it made me change my career choice from surgeon to GP! While working in the hospitals I got fed up with doctors speaking down to GPs and complaining about them referring everything etc. Some of my friends went into General Practice as they couldn't be bothered to stick at hospital work which really irritated me as I never saw it is as a negative fall-back option but a positive career choice which can be re...

Dr Sonia Kumar, Director of Undergraduate Primary Care Education at Imperial College London, has secured a grant from Health Education North West London (HENWL) to fund an innovative one year pilot teaching project. The Community Provider Network (CPN) project involves pairing thirty medical students with thirty nursing students, in primary care, to oversee the management of a group of patients with chronic conditions at high risk of emergency hospital admission. The aims are to use health coaching by nursing and medical students to improve health outcomes in these patients, optimise their management in primary care settings, and reduce the burden on acute services. We will recruit 20 to 30 practices for this CPN pilot and practices would host a pair of students for up to 6 months. Students will be assigned 4 to 6 patients with chronic problems at high risk of complications and of using acute services. Students will visit each patient about once a week and GPs would guide studen...

Imperial College London now has an Undergraduate General Practice Society. With the existence of multiple other medical specialty societies, as well as an active, high-achieving Primary Care Department, the need for a General Practice society was clear to medical students, to ensure more Imperial College medical students consider General Practice as a career. Operating under the name ICGPS (or ‘GPsoc’ as they like to be called), the society is a group of enthusiastic medical students. Working with the Department of Primary Care, ICGPS aims to host events as well as inform members of relevant external events. The society held its first event on 26 March 2014. Further information about the society can be found on its Facebook Page . If you have any suggestions for events, or would like ICGPS to advertise relevant events, please contact: gp.careers@ic.ac.uk . The ICGPS Committee comprises Josephine Emmanuel, Shanil Shivji, Alexis Nelson, Mouni Islam, Tobi Obisanya.