Imperial College London Primary Care

I am fortunate, to have many varied roles. No day is ever really the same for me so writing about a typical day is a challenge. For three days a week (Mondays, Tuesdays and Fridays), I am a locum GP having recently moved to Liverpool and sadly leaving my salaried role in West London. For the three days as a GP I’m mostly ferrying my kids to school, rushing to my practice, seeing 16 patients and possibly a home visit, admin and then rushing back to collect kids before ferrying them again to activities, cooking dinner and homework. I attempt to get the kids to sleep by 8pm but usually fail miserably until about 9.30pm. I try and do a bit of work for at least half an hour every evening during my "peace and quiet adult time" - either a project for Imperial, a medico-legal report, an appraisal or writing children's books which is a hobby of mine. After that it's bed. My two days a week as a course lead for year 3 MICA start on a Wednesday morning at 4.05am. I quietly pott…

This summer the Department of Primary Care and Public Health kicked off an exciting new programme to Widening Access to Careers in Community Healthcare (WATCCH). We hosted twenty 17 year olds – aspiring to be the first in their families to go to university – at the Charing Cross campus for the inaugural WATCCH project. Our aim was to change perceptions of wider healthcare careers and provide vital work experience for their University application forms. Competition was high and the team was very impressed by the number of high calibre students that applied for a place.


The pupils, in pairs, then attended a 3-day work experience attachment at a General Practice over the summer, where they shadowed various health care professionals ranging from pharmacists, to phlebotomists, nurses, physiotherapists and GPs. 
Our budding health professionals reported that they had their eyes opened to new and different careers in healthcare they were not previously aware of. One pupil commented that they h…

AAME, Helsinki. Jenna Mollaney, Primary Care Education Manager


After tackling the overwhelming brochure of talks and workshops at AMEE (Association of Medical Education Europe) 2017, I settled upon a stream entitled ‘Social Accountability’. We were a small group of no more than 20 people and after the presentations, I felt sad that more people hadn’t been able to hear about the amazing work that is going on about SA (Social Accountability) in Medical Schools across the world. Hopefully this article will do a little bit to help get Educators thinking about their part in it.
First of all, what is Social Accountability? I found this video created by the International Federation of Medical Students Associations extremely enlightening: http://ifmsa.org/social-accountability/
It made me wonder, what are we at Imperial College doing to help support the idealistic vision of what a Medical School should look like? We want to create not only competent Doctors; but, Doctors with hearts who unde…

Student-Patient Partnerships
One of the most memorable medical education initiatives that I took home from the AMEE (Association of Medical Education Europe) conference this year was the importance of the patient role in teaching medical students. I attended two talks which outlined formal patient/teaching partnerships and was impressed that such formal groups have been brought together to participate in student teaching on a regular and structured basis across different specialties in the undergraduate degree programme.
Most notable were two initiatives, the first run by the University of Sheffield, Patients as Educators Programme https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/aume/pae_deptwhere an established (large) group of patients act as regular educators across the degree course, concentrating on the teaching of history taking, physical examination and clinical assessment.
Equally impressive was the University of British Columbia’s ‘Patient and Community Partnership for Education’ https://pcpe.heal…