SAPC Supporting Your Career

Building and sustaining a vibrant Academic Primary Care workforce lies at the heart of what we do.

SAPC supports you and your work by helping you to develop your career, and by letting other people know why what you do matters.

Raising the profile of your work and what you do

SAPC champions excellent academic primary care at the heart of constant improvement in primary care provision. We offer

  • career support to professionals seeking to develop excellence in the provision of primary care and the advancement of academic primary care.
  • a clear voice and a strong presence for APC in the complex and ever-changing Primary Care environment.
  • a point of reference and contact for those seeking academic solutions to the problems they face in the provision and study of Primary Care.

We therefore support your work and your career through improving public, political and professional understanding of why what we do matters.

Supporting you

We also work to offer resources that enable academics to enter into the field of Primary Care, and to excel within the field in order that your work can make a difference in primary care.

How we support your career

We provide a range of resources that help people Get In and Get On in academic primary care: including mentorship and group affiliations, resources to support career-long learning, and opportunities to network with other academics at conference.

Getting In to APC

Our main work focuses on letting people know about APC: what it is, why it matters, and how they can get involved.

We know that some people in both clinical and academic settings still don’t know about our work (Adams 2013, Calitri 2014, Campbell  2015)

We use a collaborative approach to raise the profile of APC within different groups

  • We work closely with individual university departments – through the Heads of Departments (HODs) group, and through our newly established network of locally based SAPC Ambassadors.
  • We provide departments with member support packs to help raise the profile of APC and SAPC
  • We are working on a number of joint initiatives with key clinical partners including the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) in discussions about career support, capacity building, and impact through collaboration.
  • APOSTLE is a collaborative project between SAPC, HODs, HOTs, the NIHR School for Primary Care Research, and RCGP to provide policy and practice with an understanding of how APC offers solutions to today’s key Primary Care problems
  • We provide written evidence and expert commentary and advice to national policy areas including the Shape of Training review and the Health Select Committee Primary Care Inquiry.
  • We are also a nominating body for the national Clinical Excellence Awards scheme, with many of our senior members having key roles in assessing the contribution of senior academic GPs to delivering and improving quality primary care.
  • We maintain ongoing conversations with NIHR, Wellcome and other key research funders to negotiate future funding opportunities for APC

SAPC also regularly contributes to career events with clinicians at a variety of career stages; discussing opportunities for working with and in primary care education and research.

Getting On in APC

Support networks

We run thriving support networks for Early Career Academics, Primary Healthcare Scientists (PHoCuS members), and Academic GPs. Each group is led by an SAPC Exec member who describes more about their work on the group's webpage.

Mentorship

We run a bespoke academic primary care mentorship scheme. We have trained a number of mentors who offer primary care specific mentorship support to SAPC members. The first phase of the scheme addresses a recognised gap in mentorship support for APC members without a clinical background (PHoCuS members). The scheme is now also available to academic GPs in the earliest stage of their career (Academic Clinical Fellows). 

Career development workshops

Getting on in Academic  Primary Care

  • SAPC partnered with NIHR to run a workshop on personal profile and building a career portfolio. We will be running similar events at future meetings.

Working with the Media

  • SAPC Exec member Jeremy Horwood ran this workshop on raising the profile and impact of your work through working with the media.

Early Career Academics Networking Event

  • Following a successful launch in May 2016, the ECA group will be his hosting this event again - looking at career pathways, standing out from the crowd, networking and fellowship applications.

Standing out from the crowd: Career development opportunities

Working with SAPC

  • SAPC membership offers opportunities to apply for a variety of strategic and executive roles – working with us to champion excellence in education and research at the heart of constant improvement in primary care.
  • SAPC roles are a great way to develop your CV, developing new skills and experiences which add to your career portfolio and help you stand out from the crowd.
  • Elections for SAPC Executive are held annually, with Exec members all taking on lead roles in developing SAPC workpackages.
  • We have additional co-opted roles created to address identified gaps/needs within Exec. These are advertised through our monthly newsletter.
  • SAPC national and regional conferences are run by local host teams (with support from SAPC). Running a conference is a great way to make new connections, develop new skills, add to your CV.

Prizes

  • SAPC offers a range of annual awards and prizes, recognizing quality work and individual achievement.

Building your networks

Collaborative working can enhance the quality and impact of your work: keeping it relevant, sparking new ideas, getting it heard by the people who need to know. SAPC conferences provide a key opportunity to share work, build networks. Conversations continue beyond those meetings through our newsletter, website, twitter feed and blog. Send us news that you want to send out to the wider

Our Special Interest Groups (SIGs) offer an additional way to build a network of people who share a common area of work. Our SIGs particularly  offer support and profile  for areas of work that are overlooked by other funding streams and support mechanisms. Focusing on key prioritiy areas for APC – providing the basic science, and research in to the core values of primary care.

Developing resources

Our resources have been developed in response to the needs of primary care academics identified in our career scoping work and in feedback to our Early Career Academic, Primary Healht Care Scientists (PHoCuS), and academic General Practice groups.

We continue to pilot new work and welcome suggestions and input from members interested in developing new ideas. Contact our Chair, Joanne, to discuss your ideas further.