GP Scholarship - developing skills for extended roles

Introduction

We urgently need to rethink GP careers: in order to deliver staff with the additional skills and expertise needed for modern primary care practice, and to re-engage students, trainees and doctors with a vision of General Practice as an exciting and worthwhile career option.

Academic primary care has a key role to play in these changes. SAPC and RCGP are working together to drive and deliver the GP Scholarship programme: championing & cultivating the intellectual expertise at the heart of General Practice. In order to support the changing clinical skills needed to tackle emerging health needs recognised e.g. within multimorbidity, frailty and medically unexplained symptoms. Also, to develop the extended skills in innovation and implementation that the profession needs to lead and deliver the service changes needed.

A key part of that work is the development of a Skills Academy. GPs on the ground have told us that they want new/additional opportunities to gain experience and skills in academic-related work. For some, this may be a springboard into formal academic training; for others it is about creating new portfolio career options (and new partners for us to work with). Some resources are already out there eg in RCGP/CRN resources or in formal postgraduate training that we offer. But people describe gaps.

Aims and outcomes

This workshop will contribute to the development of the SAPC-RCGP Skills Academy. This interactive workshop will start with an update on the GP Scholarship work, then use a (very) modified citizens jury approach to invite you to consider 3 questions: 1) what are the extended skills needed by (future) portfolio GPs to support scholarly engagement in service improvement and redesign; 2) what existing resources are available to address these needs (including opportunities for participants to link their existing  institutional training activities to the GP scholarship programme); and 3) where are the remaining gaps – what new programmes of activity do we need to develop and commission.

Findings will shape the work of theGP Scholarship programme, and be fed back to jobbing GPs at the workshop we are holding at RCGP conference in Glasgow.

Intended audience 

We welcome all researchers, educators and clinicians with interest/experience in describing & developing the skills of scholarship. The workshop will be of particualr interest to academics interested in opening up access to current or future/planned research/schoalrship training in their institutions to the wider clinical community.