Co-Creating Education and Research: Solutions to Primary Care Problems

Warwick Primary Care

We are delighted to be sending a warm hello from us all at Warwick Medical School (WMS).

Warwick Primary Care is the newly re-forming group of academics here at WMS. Our group has been established to work with you to help improve primary care through education and research. Professor Jeremy Dale still leads our team, with other familiar faces including Professors Frances Griffiths and Martin Underwood, Drs Kate Owen and Anne Slowther, who all continue to lead undergraduate and postgraduate education programmes, along with cutting edge research supporting the advancement of primary care.

We are particularly pleased to have welcomed some new members to our group.

Dr Sarah Mitchell is an established GP who has led innovative work locally in developing local primary care palliative care services, particularly for children and young people. Sarah has now been awarded a prestigious NIHR doctoral fellowship to undertake her PhD with us here at Warwick.

Our newest team member, Assistant Professor Helen Atherton is a primary healthcare scientist who has just joined us from Oxford. Helen is a leading expert in the use of information and communication technologies as tools for delivering primary care to patients. Helen was recently awarded the Yvonne Carter prize for outstanding new researcher in recognition of her work in this area. Helen’s arrival is certainly very timely in light of the emphasis on these forms of working in Professor Martin Roland’s recent Primary Care Workforce Commission report:

“The future of primary care

Creating teams for tomorrow”

Associate Professor Joanne Reeve joined us from Liverpool earlier this year. Joanne’s work focuses on developing and evaluating expert generalist solutions for many of the complex challenges facing today’s primary care community. She leads work in the areas of multimorbidity, problematic polypharmacy, difficult mental health problems, and acute care.

We are fortunate to have Associate Professor Stefan Hjørleifsson visiting us from Bergen, Norway. Stefan’s work focuses on over-diagnosis and the ethics of ‘too much medicine’. He is with us for twelve months, and we are making the most of his visiting expertise.

This means we have a growing team of clinical and non-clinical academics with a range of skills and experience in tackling the problems facing today’s primary health care.

What we do

The focus for our work is on supporting the redesign of primary care to meet today’s challenges. Our work is grouped under four themes:

1. Complex Illness and the expert generalist

2. Building a general practice and primary care workforce

3. Innovative solutions to workload capacity issues

4. Co-production of practice based evidence driving quality improvement

We will be introducing each area of work in more detail in forthcoming Participate articles.

All of us working in primary care face significant challenges at the moment. But our current difficulties are also stimulating some exciting innovation across our clinical and academic communities. We are looking forward to continuing to share our experience, skills and ideas with you as we work together to drive improvement in primary care.

If you would like more information please go to our website: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/med/about/centres/wpc/ or contact Associate Professor Joanne Reeve, email: j.reeve.1@warwick.ac.uk