Education for Primary Care

BACKGROUND: Telehealth involves real-time communication (telephone or video-call) between patients and health providers. The COVID-19 pandemic propelled general practitioners to conduct most consultations remotely, seeing patients face-to-face only when required. Placement opportunities and experience for medical students were reduced. Initially online learning programmes replaced clinical attachments. Subsequently, clinical teachers supervised students to engage in remote consultations, either in clinics or from their homes...

BACKGROUND: Patients who are annoyed, upset, angry or uncooperative may be categorised as having behavioural problems, shifting the blame from healthcare providers to patients. This can exacerbate the problem. Adopting an empathic approach to such consultations can reduce anger and frustration and improve patient care. APPROACH: A pilot teaching session was introduced to the second year of the medical degree at Leicester Medical School with the aim of preparing students to deal with difficult consultations and helping them to understand the impact of empathy in such situations...

As 3rd-year medical students at Imperial College London, we investigated Salbutamol overuse in the community of Islington. We were inspired to carry out this project due to the high prevalence of Salbutamol overuse which became evident during our GP placement. This was part of our Community Action Project (CAP) which aims for students to investigate issues within their GP practice and patient population and create solutions to help overcome this, like a quality improvement project. This project focused on the local community around the GP practice...

Clinicians with teaching and training roles should be adequately trained and assessed. However, some debate exists as to what the nature of this training should be. Historically, a postgraduate certificate in education was a pre-requisite to becoming a GP trainer but this is changing with growing concern that such a pre-requisite might act as a deterrent to potential GP trainers. This research examines the impact of a scheme designed to provide an alternative, more practical and focused, pathway to becoming a GP trainer...

General Practice has changed over the past decade. Expansion of clinicians' roles may create uncertainty, stress, and overload - particular for those at the start of their career. The WONCA Europe network for medical education, EURACT, has published competency-based aims and requirements for speciality training in general practice. Greater understanding of the trainee perspective would support planning and delivery of postgraduate training curricula. This two-step study aims to provide a competency priority list, created by European early career general practitioners, to highlight skills that this generation considers highly essential in future speciality training...

INTRODUCTION: UK undergraduate medical curricula are under pressure to become more community-focused and generalist in approach to equip all future doctors with generalist skills and increase recruitment to generalist specialities like general practice. However, the amount of general practice teaching in UK undergraduate curricula is static or falling. Undervaluing, in the form of general practice denigration and undermining, is increasingly recognised from a student perspective. However, little is known about the perspectives of academics working within medical schools...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

Clinical reasoning is a vital medical education skill, yet its nuances in undergraduate primary care settings remain debated. This systematic review explores clinical reasoning teaching and learning intricacies within primary care. We redefine clinical reasoning as dynamically assimilating and prioritising synthesised patient, significant other, or healthcare professional information for diagnoses or non-diagnoses. This focused meta-synthesis applies transformative learning theory to primary care clinical reasoning education...

BACKGROUND: Healthcare Quality Improvement (QI) is an essential skill for medical students to acquire, although there is insufficient empirical research which suggests the best educational methods to do this. This study explored the experiences of medical students participating in two versions of a Community Action Project (CAP) which gave medical students the opportunity to learn QI skills in a community setting. The first version (GPCAP) was pre-pandemic where students identified and delivered QI projects on placement in general practice to improve local population health...

INTRODUCTION: COVID-19 presented major challenges to undergraduate GP placement capacity and there was an increased reliance on clinical training using facilitated simulation. The authors present a novel comparison of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of delivering a one-week primary care course using entirely GP-facilitated clinical teaching outside the GP setting against traditional practice-based GP clinical education. METHODS: A one-week GP placement was redeveloped from a traditional teaching model (TT-M) to an exclusively facilitated teaching model (FT-M) delivered outside the GP practice setting, using principles of blended learning, flipped classroom methods, e-learning and simulation...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

INTRODUCTION: Effective communication is essential for patient-centred relationships. Although medical graduates acquire communication skills during undergraduate training, these have been shown to be inadequate in early practice. Both students' and patients' perspectives are required to improve readiness for the workplace, patient satisfaction, and health outcomes. Our research question was: to what extent are medical students prepared with patient-centred communication skills in primary care settings? METHODS: A qualitative descriptive research study using in-depth semi-structured interviews was conducted with Year 3 medical students and patients to study their experiences at a primary care clinic, over two weeks...

Disagreement exists within the UK and Ireland regarding how Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships should be defined, and the relevance of international definitions. In this modified, online Delphi study, we presented the UK and Ireland experts in Longitudinal Integrated Clerkships with statements drawn from international definitions, published LIC literature, and the research team's experience in this area and asked them to rate their level of agreement with these statements for inclusion in a bi-national consensus definition...

GP educationalists are crucial in training the future medical workforce and in developing and advancing the field of primary care medical education, yet opportunities in the UK are patchy and varied. In this article, a group of GP educationalists summarise the challenges facing the sustainability of this particular group of clinical academics and outline opportunities available at each career stage, from medical students through to senior GP educationalists. Recommendations to support the growth of this workforce include the development of a nationally recognised framework for GP educationalist careers, collaboration with professional and educational bodies and taking steps to level out opportunities in order to reduce existing inequity...

A high-performing, integrated, primary healthcare system is essential to achieve universal health coverage (UHC) goals and improve health indicators. There is enough evidence that healthcare is cost-effective with significantly better outcomes in countries where primary care is delivered through trained family physicians. The concept of "Family Practice approach" is relatively new in developing countries like Pakistan, where majority of basic healthcare is provided by doctors without a formal postgraduate training...

PURPOSE: As deaths from the illicit drug poisoning crisis continue to rise in Canada, increasing the number of healthcare professionals qualified to effectively prescribe opioids could be beneficial. The willingness of family medicine residents to undertake structured training in prescribing opioids for Opioid Agonist Treatment (OAT) and pain management have not been well described. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Family medicine residents ( n  = 20) in British Columbia, Canada, were asked about their experience with and willingness to enrol in OAT training...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

The Applied Knowledge Test (AKT) is one third of the licensing exam to become a General Practitioner in the United Kingdom. It is a computer-based, machine-marked multiple-choice examination with an overall pass rate of around 70%. Statistics reveal international medical graduates to have lower rates of passing. The aim of this evaluation was to determine the key features of preparation for the exam used by successful candidates. A questionnaire survey was sent to recently successful general practice trainees in Southampton...

No abstract text is available yet for this article.

No abstract text is available yet for this article.