Imperial College London Primary Care

It is with great sadness that we say a fond farewell to Dr Jenny Lebus who will be retiring at the end of June after 32 years of service at the Department of Primary Care and Public Health at Imperial College London and its predecessor medical schools. . Jenny began her academic teaching career when her trainer, Dr James Scobie, who was a GP tutor for the old Charing Cross Medical School, invited her to accompany him to a study day with the students. Her interest was ignited and she joined a department that at that time consisted of three people when General Practice occupied only one week of a five-year curriculum. Despite having no administrative support or funding to pay general practices, Jenny was successful in recruiting practices and saw the course and department steadily grow from humble beginnings. From that one week in Year 4, the course grew to two weeks in Year 4 and two weeks in Year 5, whilst also changing course names from Core 1 and Core 2, to General Practice and ...

Senior GP Teaching Fellow Dr Graham Easton from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care recently visited Ghana on behalf of the BBC World Service to host a radio debate on whether failed health systems in Africa make global epidemics - such as the recent Ebola outbreak - inevitable. The debate explored why the Ebola outbreak was able to spread so widely, and looked at broader lessons about containing local epidemics in today’s globalised world. The expert panel included the Liberian ambassador to the UK [formerly to Ghana], the World Health Organisation’s representative in Ghana, the Operations Director of Medicins Sans Frontieres, and the Communications Minister for Ghana, as well as about a hundred other invited guests from Ghana and the worst-affected countries. As well as co-hosting the debate with BBC Africa presenter Akwasi Sarpong, Graham was interviewed about Ebola on local radio stations, BBC partner stations across Africa, and contributed to a live special editi...

Congratulations to Tom Cowling from the Department of Primary Care and Public Health in the School of Public Health at Imperial College London for winning the the SAPC Early Career Researcher Prize at the 2015 South-East England Regional Meeting. Commenting on Tom's presentation , Jenni Burt from Cambridge University stated that: " There were some great presentations this year. I’ll single out Tom Cowling from Imperial College, who analysed national hospital administrative data to find that patients registered with general practices with poorer reported access had a higher rate of emergency admission to hospital via A&E than patients in practices with higher reported access. Much debate was had about the significance of this, but it was a really nice analysis: even Gary Abel our statistician said so, which is a rare accolade."

Every on in the Department of Primary Care & Public Health at Imperial College London was very pleased to learn that one of our academic general practitioners, Dr Ho Harris, has been appointed as Deputy Head of Undergraduate Medicine at Imperial College London, Dr Harris comments on her new role. "I am delighted to share with you my new appointment as Deputy Head of Undergraduate Medicine at Imperial College London. It is the first time that a General Practitioner has been appointed to a senior role in the school and shows that the medical school is committed to training future doctors in the speciality of Primary Care. Imperial College is keen to ensure our students are not only academically excellent but also well versed as generalists. In this role, it is exciting to have an overview of the whole six years of the course as well as start to think how our students could be better taught in the future. As the way medicine is practised changes with GPs seeing more complex ...

The Imperial College London School of Public Health held an away day for senior academic staff on 14-15 January 2015 at the Sir Christopher Wren Hotel in Windsor. A range of topics were discussed including strategic priorities and encouraging greater collaboration between different research groups. We agreed that future priorities would include a greater emphasis on the design and implementation of interventional public health and primary care programmes, and their evaluation.

Dr Elizabeth Muir has accepted an appointment to lead a programme of work supporting Imperial College's School of Medicine’s ‘Year of Feedback’. The purpose of this project is to identify and deliver improvements to the feedback provided to our students throughout the undergraduate Medicine programmes. Dr Muir is a Clinical Senior Lecturer in the Department of Primary Care and Public Health and a General Practitioner. She is also Theme Leader for Foundations of Clinical Practice and co-leads the Problem Based Learning teaching.

As part of the forthcoming Dermatology GP course for fifth year medical students a Imperial College London, we have developed an exciting and innovative workshop with the aim of improving students’ observation skills in dermatology using arts-based teaching. Dr Jamila Sherif gives an update on the aims of the workshop. The arts can help us to slow perception, learn to look closely at the whole picture and see things anew. It is collaboration between arts-educators and medical educators, which in itself give rise to mutual learning and unique insights. An arts-based approach to teach clinical observation skills has been integrated into some US medical schools for over a decade. A literature review identified papers that have evaluated student learning though art and proposed systematic observation of paintings can be used to aid development of visual observation skills. We have drawn on and developed this work, trying to design a session that focuses not only on visual but tactile ...