Read more about Liz's experience below:

I was awarded the British Empire Medal for two things, firstly the work I did as Staff Covid Swabbing Hub Lead with the Wolverhampton Quality Team, which is part of Black Country and West Birmingham CCG. This involved being day to day operational lead, and also taking a strategic lead on planning and the development of standard operating procedures and policies for staff swabbing. Secondly it was for leading on a Strategy and Retention Plan for General Practice Nursing across the CCG footprint, which was recognised by NHS England and Improvement.

Both of these projects were 100% team effort and couldn't have been achieved without the support of my clinical and non-clinical colleagues (from the CCG, general practice, acute trust and local authority) who worked on everything from policy development and co-design, to swabbing, security and marshaling, to booking patients in, chasing and recording results, to training, organising estate and the supply of equipment and PPE. I'm proud to share the award with them.

We unfortunately didn't win the HSJ Patient Safety Team of the year award but were shortlisted for the work we did around staff and care home swabbing, improving infection prevention procedures with the aim of reducing harm and safeguarding patients.

Medics training to become general practitioners reported a significant positive improvement in their mental wellbeing after participating in a specially-designed mindfulness programme, a study from Warwick Medical School researchers shows.

Warwick Medical School authors, Dr Helen Atherton, Dr Jo Parsons and Dr Carol Bryce looked at the rate of missed GP appointments in the UK. Their findings are published in the BJGP and Jo Parsons is also interviewed in a podcast discussing some of the findings and implications of this work.

Missed general practice appointments have considerable time and cost implications for the NHS, and leaves patients with unmet health needs, and potentially delayed diagnoses or medical treatment. This systematic review, entitled ‘Which patients miss appointments with general practice and the reasons why’ updated work conducted in 2003, and aimed to examine the rate of missed booked appointments, which patients are more likely to miss appointments, and some reasons for this. Findings of this review has potential implications for practices in targeting interventions to patients that are at increased likelihood of missing appointments, and in attempting to overcome common reasons that appointments are missed.

More information can be found on the GP Online webpages here.

Hospice care across the West Midlands has received an exciting boost as WMS researchers have received a quarter of a million pound grant to establish better care for terminally ill patients.

Rachel Spencer (GP Academic Clinical Lecturer with UAPC) has been awarded a highly competitive NIHR Advanced Fellowship. This award is for £850,000 over four years and is the largest funding ever to be handled by Coventry and Rugby CCG.

Dr Jean-Pierre Laake, a final year MB ChB student at WMS, who has continued to work as an epidemiologist alongside his studies, is highlighting the need to support good mental health in older adults during the winter months.

A new study by WMS researchers has found that mindfulness could help trainee GPs to build their resilience and reduce burnout, helping to reduce the number of newly qualified GPs leaving the profession.

Care Companion, a Unit of Academic Primary Care project, benefits from a creative partnership award allowing artists to continue their work during the COVID-19 pandemic through collaboration with researchers from the social sciences, arts, science and medicine from across both the city’s universities.

The term ‘morning sickness’ is misleading and should instead be described as nausea and sickness in pregnancy, argue researchers from WMS who have demonstrated that these symptoms can occur at any time of the day – not just the morning.

The Yvonne Carter Award for Outstanding Early Career Researcher has been awarded to Dr Sarah Mitchell. Sarah recently gained her PhD here at WMS, supervised by Prof Jeremy Dale. It is especially exciting that Sarah should receive this award, as Yvonne Carter was Dean of Warwick Medical School from 2004 to 2009.

A new study by WMS researchers shows that sending discharge letters to patients as well as their GPs when they leave hospital could make a substantial difference to patient outcomes.

The role that online resources have played in supporting the wellbeing of unpaid carers and keeping them connected during the COVID-19 lockdown is being highlighted this week by the WMS team behind Care Companion.

Building connections between GP practices and local parkrun events could help to improve the health and wellbeing of patients and staff, finds a new study by Warwick Medical School.

A new tool developed by Warwick Medical School to help carers manage the daily challenges of life when caring for a friend or loved one has been presented to the Minister of State for Care at Westminster.

A new study by our researchers has revealed that over 40% of GPs intend to leave general practice over the next five years - an increase of nearly a third since 2014.

A new study from Warwick Medical School blames macro-level factors for the double burden of malnutrition among adolescents in developing countries.

A personalised online resource specifically for carers of older people in the UK has been launched by the University of Warwick.

It has been developed by primary care specialists and researchers at Warwick Medical School, GPs, the NHS and local authority managers, with very close involvement from Age UK Warwickshire and carers group, and funded by the NHS, Warwickshire County Council and Global Initiative's 100k Social Digital Fund.

Called Care Companion www.carecompanion.org.uk, it is being launched during national Carers Week 11-17 June 2018.

A delegation from Thailand’s Ministry of Public Health visited the University of Warwick on the 8th March to learn about healthcare in the UK and find out about how the NHS tackles population health within the NHS.

School-based healthy lifestyle interventions alone are not effective in the fight against childhood obesity, according to research conducted in the West Midlands.

The realities of implementing alternatives to face-to-face GP consultations, such as telephone, email, online and video consultations, mean that hoped-for reductions in GP workload and increases in available appointments for patients might not be realised according to a study led by Helen Atherton of Warwick Medical School.