Category: Teaching

Festival of Teaching 2023

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By Dr Simon Thornton, GP Engagement Lead, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol (left) and Professor Trevor Thompson, GP and Head of Primary Care Teaching, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol (right)

For the last two years the teaching arm of the Centre for Academic Primary Care (CAPC) have been doing something a little different when it comes to Continuing Professional Development (CPD): a Teaching Festival, a day of activities that aims to celebrate and entertain as well inform and train.

This year our destination was Clevedon Hall, a stone’s throw from the marine lake on the shore at Clevedon. On display throughout the day was a collection of artwork produced by our medical students as well as photography by a local GP, Dr Jon Rees. The grounds are an absolute delight as was our programme of … Read more

CAPC Festival of Teaching

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by Dr Simon Thornton, GP and GP Engagement Lead, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol and Professor Trevor Thompson, GP and Head of Primary Care Teaching, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol

The Centre for Academic Primary Care (CAPC) at the University of Bristol is a leading centre for primary care teaching and research based in Bristol Medical School. In April 2022, we held an inaugural Festival of Teaching at Bristol Zoo, to celebrate the skill and commitment of GP teachers, who are helping develop the primary care workforce of the future.

The day started with an introduction to teaching for the coming (2022/23) academic year from the teaching team. If you’re interested in teaching medical students and haven’t seen it already, do take a look at our Teaching Brochure that gives you all the information you need about teaching … Read more

‘Our First Year Heard’ – curating the experiences of first-year medical students during the COVID-19 pandemic

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By Louis Davenport, Medical Student, Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol

My name is Louis Davenport, and I am a second-year medical student at the University of Bristol. I am the organiser of ‘Our First Year Heard’, a student art collection showcasing the effects of COVID-19 on first-year medical students.

The seed of the idea came from an extremely intense, one might say uncomfortable, experience that I had in the dissection room in my first year at medical school. While I am not particularly artistic myself, I made use of poetry to help process the experience and wrote several drafts of what would become What’s in front of you. From there I thought, why not collect the experiences of first-year medical students who might similarly wish to share them with other medical students and the wider public? Capturing the unique experiences of people who … Read more

‘Medical education with a global perspective’

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A first-time view of the Association for the Study of Medical Education Conference

Photo of Dr Juliet Brown

 

by Dr Juliet Brown
Teaching Fellow in Primary Care
Centre for Academic Primary Care

 

Conferences are a microcosm of collaboration, critique and niche scholarship, which can sometimes seem a world away from ‘real life’.  Yet I always come away from them feeling enthused, energised, and with a new sense of purpose.

This year I attended the Association for the Study of Medical Education (ASME) annual conference for the first time, and I’m happy to say, it lived up to expectations.

I was one of a team of five, along with others from the wider Bristol Medical School (and Academies). With so many sessions to choose from, we deployed ourselves at different plenary, parallel and poster sessions. The theme was ‘Medical Education with a Global Perspective’.

It was great to hear and learn from international … Read more

Why GPs should teach

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by Simon ThorntonSimon Thornton
GP Engagement Lead
Centre for Academic Primary Care

‘Encourage more GP practices to teach medical students‘.

Sounds simple doesn’t it? That was the brief for me starting as GP Engagement Lead in September 2016. Teaching is something I’m passionate about and is one of the highlights of my week in practice. It’s always a good day at work when I’ve had students with me and I love to share my enthusiasm for teaching with other GPs.

However, encouraging GPs to take on new work, as exciting and rewarding as it is, is difficult at a time of unprecedented workload and pressure in general practice. Enter ‘Step up and Teach’ – a campaign we’re running to highlight the benefits to practices of teaching medical students. The question we want practices to ask themselves is ‘can we afford not to teach?’.

Reasons to teach

We already know … Read more

How do we support GPs providing end of life care?

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by Dr Lucy SelmanDr Lucy Selman
Research Fellow (Qualitative Research in Randomised Trials)
Centre for Academic Primary Care

GPs are vital to the delivery of end of life care. They coordinate care, provide generalist palliative care, help prevent unnecessary hospital admissions, and, in England, commission local health and social care services. Crucially, they help shift care from hospitals to the community, which is where most people would prefer to die.

But providing good care at the end of life is not always straightforward. There’s evidence that GPs can find it challenging, and that the quality of end of life care by GPs can be problematic. The Royal College of General Practitioners and the House of Commons Health Committee therefore recognise the urgent need for evidence-based education in end of life care for GPs. However, the evidence base for GP training in end of life care is unclear, and no rigorous evaluations … Read more

Creating a data archive of GP consultations – the motivations and challenges

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One in a million logoBy Dr Rebecca Barnes
Senior Research Fellow
Centre for Academic Primary Care

Nearly 14 years ago in summer school at University of California Santa Barbara, Professor Don Zimmerman provided my introduction to the analysis of institutional, in particular medical, interaction.

Those studies set the benchmark for my own research ambitions but the main obstacle I faced was getting access to data.

For all the right reasons, medical consultations data are challenging to collect. Where ethical approval is in place for reuse it is often restricted to the original research team. Sometimes retrospective approvals for reuse of existing data are possible but even then, consultations data that has been collected without reuse in mind is often of variable quality; the process of data collection and participant characteristics are not well-documented, recordings can be incomplete and they are often audio-only.

The idea for the Primary Care Consultations Archive was born with this … Read more

Why do some medical schools produce more General Practitioners than others?

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Simon ThorntonBy Simon Thornton
GP registrar and academic clinical fellow
Centre for Academic Primary Care

As someone who has come into general practice via another specialty, I am particularly interested in what leads people to choose a career in primary care, and how we might be able to help improve recruitment.

There are lots of factors that influence people to choose a career in general practice. These include certain personality traits, such as scoring more highly on measures of empathy, being a graduate entry medic, exposure to general practice at an undergraduate level, and the attitudes of other healthcare professionals towards general practice. What I find most interesting is that there is a huge influence depending on which medical school you went to.

In 2012, of all doctors finishing their foundation programme training, only 11% of Cambridge graduates entered primary care training compared to 38.5% of Keele graduates.

Does this difference … Read more

Do we really need primary care academics?

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Gene FederBy Gene Feder
GP and Professor of Primary Care
Centre for Academic Primary Care

I recently took part in a debate hosted by the Centre for Primary Care and Public Health (QMUL) where I argued that the future quality of the NHS depends on academic primary care.

The vote at the start of the debate: in favour 16, against 11, abstaining 2.

My pitch was based on the challenges of developing integrated health (and social care) for our aging population, a patient-centred shared decision-making model of medical practice, and turning back  the commercially (and specialist) driven tide of over-diagnosis and over-treatment. The future quality of the NHS requires those challenges to be met and will depend on a vigorous primary care-based system. And that will (in part) depend on the work of primary care academics.  I reminded the audience that I was using the term “academic” to mean having to … Read more