Edited by Professor Chris Dowrick, University of Liverpool

The latest volume in the Routledge Advances in the Medical Humanities series provides a thoughtful and thought provoking new assesssment of a core concept in primary care - the Self.

Professor Dowrick described the reasons for writing the book:

"Primary care, grounded in the provision of continuous comprehensive person-centred care, is vital to the delivery of effective health care. The central notion of person-centred care, however, relies on often-unexamined concepts of self, or understandings of what it means to be
a person. This book explores contemporary pressures on the sense of self for both patient and health professional within a consultation and argues that building new concepts of the self is essential. Combining theoretical perspectives with insights drawn from practice, this volume
is suitable for those researching and studying primary healthcare, communication and relationships in healthcare and the medical humanities"

This brand new text, written by members of SAPC's SIG on The self in Primary Care is now available for preorder.

There are several of us who are trained psychologists working in primary care departments, across the UK and beyond, however this may not always be apparent. Psychologists run the risk of going unnoticed as a discipline if our roles don’t require us to provide specific psychology input and/or if our job titles don’t identify us as psychologists (e.g. holding generic titles such as research fellow). We need to identify ourselves and the skills we can offer for both ourselves and academic primary care to thrive.

The Annual General Meeting of the Society for Academic Primary Care will take place from 12.30 to 13.25 on Thursday 13th July 2017 during the 46th Annual Scientific Meeting at the University of Warwick 

Here are the papers:

Agenda

Paper A - draft minutes from AGM 2016 Dublin

Paper B - Officers' report

Championing and cultivating the intellectual expertise at the heart of the profession of General Practice

SAPC, working in partnership with the RCGP, is leading work to raise the profile of, capacity for, and impact of clinical scholarship across the Primary Care community.

We need strong Academic Primary Care, now more than ever, if we are to achieve the effective, efficient, equitable health care that the best models of primary care can deliver. The strength of our discipline comes from bringing together Primary Care clinicians, including GPs, and Primary Health Care Scientists in a shared goal of championing excellence in primary care scholarship driving improvements in primary care provision.

What do we mean by scholarship?

Scholarship refers to both the intellectual capacity of individual GPs (Every GP a Scholar) and the collective professional wisdom.

Our view of scholarship recognises the full range of intellectual tasks described by Boyer . Namely, Discovery (including original research); Integration (information synthesis across discipline/topics/time); Application (discovering ways to use knowledge to solve problems); and Inspiration (teaching). Scholarship is defined by tasks and actions not by job title or contractual status.

Scholarship is a necessary part of professional excellence: both in clinical consultation as well as the extended roles of GPs including practice development and organisation, education, innovation, leadership, research.

Collective professional wisdom is an integral part of Academic Primary Care: the distinct body of work and knowledge that defines, develops and delivers the person-centred model/system of healthcare that is primary care.

In 2017, we will be holding an election for one place on SAPC Executive, to serve from July 2017-2020.

The Executive team lead the work of SAPC to raise the profile of Academic Primary Care, build a vibrant workforce by helping people Get In and Get On in APC, and enhance the impact of our work through supporting collaborations.

Professor Helen Lester was secretary to SAPC from 2004-2010 and Chair from 2010-2013. She was an inspirational GP and academic who made a difference to the lives of many people. Helen was truly one of the iconic figures of academic general practice. 

Fellowships are one route to developing a research portfolio towards becoming a leader in health research. They can be a useful way of funding people’s time, research projects and training development. Fellowships are available from a range of funders to support people at different points in their research path.

Fellowship support

The Behaviour Change Special Interest group held their first network and training day in October 2016 with a workshop focused on the Person-Based Approach to developing behaviour change interventions in primary care. The workshop was kindly hosted by the University of Southampton with support from the Centre for Clinical and Community Applications of Health Psychology (CCCAHP) and the Academic Unit of Primary Care and Population Sciences (PCPS).

The premier primary care research meeting in the United Kingdom and Ireland, the Society of Academic Primary Care (SAPC) meeting, was hosted by the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland.

Here is a round up of some of the talks that caught Domhnall's attention.