Imperial College London Primary Care

  With the increasing pressure on the Welfare State in the UK and other European countries, policy makers are increasingly looking to Self-Care as a means to empower individuals to live longer and healthier lives, whilst helping curb unnecessary spending and over-reliance on health systems. Yet self-care remains a broad and somewhat nebulous concept to most as it covers a wide spectrum of ideas and activities ranging from cognition and health literacy, to empowerment and evidence-based decision making and rationing of resources.  This makes self-care an exciting but also a challenging area to study. Self-care has been extensively defined and considered by various academic groups and conceptualised from several different perspectives. Paradoxically, the academic exercise of understanding self-care as a broad concept has not as yet resulted in a definitive canon of evidence that makes the absolute case for self-care and its realised benefits in the real-world se...

The WATCCH Team at the Department of Primary Care and Public Health This summer the Department of Primary Care and Public Health kicked off an exciting new programme: Widening Access to Careers in Community Healthcare (WATCCH). We hosted twenty 16-17 year olds who are 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 applications. Competition was high and the team was very impressed by the number of high calibre students that applied for a place. Year 12 Pupils from 19 London secondary schools attended an induction day in late July. During the workshop, an experienced multi-professional panel consisting of 5 professionals including an Imperial final year medical student, shared their career journeys with the pupils from their A level to postgraduate degrees. This was followed by pupils cr...