Imperial College London Primary Care

The year 3 Medicine in the Community Apprenticeship pilot year is drawing to a close and the new cohort of 150 students have been selected and are ready and poised to start phase 2 in September 2017!   Dr Shivani Tanna Year 3 Course Lead Our wonderful tutors have done an excellent job hosting students for 10 weeks at their surgeries. We have really seen our students thrive during this attachment. We have realised the value in giving the students true authentic roles where they begin seeing their own patients in clinic by week 3 and follow up their own patient case loads throughout. The student feedback has been overwhelmingly positive and they have really enjoyed feeling like integral members of the team. Not only have we had involvement from excellent GP tutors, we have also had many specialists and other GPs hosting our students for their experience and clinical skills sessions. We are excited to be using more hospital sites and GP services to help us next term. ...

This year the Imperial College GP teaching team were responsible for organising and hosting the Society for Academic Primary Care (SAPC) regional conference held on 26th & 27th January in Madingley Hall, Cambridge. Each year, one of the five London medical schools takes on this honour. We would like to share some of the highlights from mixture of workshops, prizes, speakers, dinner and a quiz with you. Dr David Hirsh and Dr Shivani Tanna The first keynote address was by Associate Professor David Hirsh from Harvard Medical School, a world-renowned expert in educational transformation. He spoke passionately about the longitudinal integrated clerkships (LIC) he has been responsible for. He outlined research demonstrating erosion of medical student empathy over the course of a ‘traditional’ undergraduate curriculum, and offered LICs as a possible solution. Here, students learn from a panel of diverse patients, following them closely by attending hospital and GP appointments wit...

GP ST1, Dr Cornelia Junghans discusses her experience during an open day at the Hospital for Integrated Medicine. I frequently get asked by patients about homeopathy, acupuncture and reflexology and find myself admitting that I don’t know much about it. As a result, I recently attended an open day at the Hospital for Integrated Medicine in London to find out more about complementary medicine in order to have a better answer for patients who ask about it. The day covered the use of a range of complementary medicine such as homeopathy, herbalism, acupuncture and hypnosis. I learnt that complementary medicine places a strong emphasis on restoring balance, focuses on the patient’s own healing powers and considers that mind and body are intrinsically linked. It made me realise that we as doctors learn about the concept of balance or homeostasis in pre-clinical years, but seem to forget about it to some degree in clinical practice. We also routinely separate body and mind for ne...

Several  members of the Department of Primary Care and Public Health attended the inaugural lecture of Professor Mitch Blair on 8 March 2017. Mitch Blair is Professor of Paediatrics and Child Public Health at Imperial College London; and a consultant paediatrician and specialist in child public health. Professor Blair is a long-standing colleague and academic collaborator, and a great proponent of primary care. During his lecture, Professor Blair spoke on the topic of "How are the kids? Improving population child health and development". Professor Blair asked his audience to i magine a future where toddlers are given individual health programmes to optimise health and development based on the latest research into public health and personalised medicine. Would this help pick up and even prevent big areas of concern for modern paediatrics, from mental health to allergies he asked? Preventive childcare dates back to the 19th century’s Boer War, where 40% of the recruits wer...

The Undergraduate Primary Care Education team in the Department of Primary Care and Public Health at Imperial College London has kicked off an exciting new work experience programme called WATCCH – Widening Access to Careers in Community Healthcare. There is a shortage of work experience in the health sector for pupils, particularly for those who have no connection to healthcare professionals. WATCCH aims to open up work experience opportunities in the healthcare sector by offering placements for sixth form pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds to shadow various allied healthcare professionals in general practices.  These 16/17 year olds have completed their GCSEs with good grades, do not have placements elsewhere, and are the first in their family applying to university.  Pupils will attend a pre-placement induction at Imperial College's Charing Cross Hospital Campus, and will then have a 3-day work experience session at a general practice where th...

Our GP Derm and Paeds Course Lead Dr Emma Metters sadly left us this month to take a new post at St George's. She reflects on her time at Imperial below: My time as GP Derm and Paeds Course Lead has come to an end but the good news is the wonderful Senita Mountjoy is returning from her maternity leave to take up the post again.  She brings so much energy and enthusiasm for the courses that she was instrumental in the design of initial delivery of.  I am sure she has many ideas of where she wants to take them so watch this space for new and exciting teaching developments on the horizon. This is not really goodbye as I will be continuing my involvement in Imperial in various ways so may well cross paths with some of you again.  I have really enjoyed my time at Imperial, in several different roles, and have gained a wealth of experience which I will be taking with me to my new role as Clinical Lecturer in Primary Care at St George’s University.  I hope many...