Happy Birthday #NHS70

Posted by jchoules

5 July 2018

Happy Birthday #NHS70 – an amazing Institution harnessing clinical, organisational, academic and management skills for the benefit of patients and the public. Right at the heart of the NHS is General Practice – the clinical specialty provided by 40,000 GPs and their teams, and delivering care at the front-end of the NHS. GPs are by their nature, disposition, training, and clinical practice, generalists in clinical medicine. GPs provide care that is coordinated, continuous and comprehensive, with many GPs having a long and valued relationship with individual patients and their families. They have central roles in the prevention, diagnosis, management, and follow-up of virtually all conditions for which a patient might seek medical help or advice. They and their teams care for over a million patients every working day – what a great job!

Here in APEx, the University of Exeter’s Collaboration for Academic Primary Care, our primary care research reflects this broad diversity of clinical interest and approach amongst primary care academics. I am proud to be part of such a great team, delivering research that matters, and high quality education that counts for the future.

Our research centres on the organisation and delivery of primary medical care in the UK, with a particular focus on access to care, alternatives to face-to-face consultations, the quality of care and the quality of patients’ experience of care, and the safety of primary care provision. Have a look here for a comprehensive summary of our work on patient experience – or you can find it in the 40 papers we’ve published on the subject in the past few years! Within APEx we have five great research groups, all delivering brilliant, patient-focused research. Here’s some examples!:

The Primary Care Research Group have recently undertaken and reported important research identifying major problems in relation to the capacity of the GP workforce, and proposed many solutions which are currently under consideration by key health institutions and authorities in the UK.
Patient and policy-focused research including the use of patient reported outcomes and the key issue of new models of care, especially models which are relevant to an ageing multimorbid population
We deliver top-quality research in key areas of clinical care that are of direct importance to patients:
- The early diagnosis of disease, especially cancer, in primary care
- Cardiovascular risk including hypertension and the early diagnosis of diabetes
- Mental health problems in primary care
- Cardiac rehabilitation

Case Study – Monitoring and Managing Patients’ Experience of Primary Care

We’ve worked with colleagues in the University of Cambridge over the past ten years to develop, and to undertake research in respect of patients’ experience of primary care. These researchers were involved in working with the NHS and with IPSOS Mori in designing the national GP Patient Survey. This survey instrument is now routinely used across all of primary care in England (7800 practices) and the resulting data provides an important overview of patients’ experience of primary care by English general practices. For example, have a look at myNHS where you can see patient experience data for all practices in England. The resulting data also forms the basis of much of the date used by the Care Quality Commission in their inspection of general practices. In previous years, GPs and their practice teams have been rewarded for both taking part in monitoring patients’ experience of care, and, at some points, for providing high quality patient experience. Such arrangements have now changed, but the GP Patient Survey remains central to the monitoring and delivery of primary care in England.

Professor John Campbell, Professor of General Practice and Primary Care, University of Exeter Medical School

So, Primary Care research matters! It would be a long blog if I tried to cover all our interests, and we’re part of a much wider community of Primary Care Academics who are delivering great primary care research and education across all of the UK.

Thanks for having a look at this – keep in contact! We’ve got a great team here in Exeter and we’re always happy to let you know what we’re up to. We’re supporting the NHS for the next 70 years!

John Campbell
Professor of General Practice and Primary Care and Director, APEx

@profjcampbell
@uoeapex
john.campbell@exeter.ac.uk