John Fry Award Winner 2025

John Fry award 2025

Congratulations to Dr Brian McMillan who received the John Fry award on 20th June June 2025 at the RCGP.

The John Fry Award is presented to a Member or Fellow of the College who has promoted the discipline of general practice through research and scholarship. The award is intended to encourage people to undertake research as a practising GP within 20 years of qualification as a GP and not holding an academic role.

Brian is a Clinical Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Primary Care and Health Services Research at the University of Manchester. As a GP and Registered Health Psychologist, his time is split between clinical work, research, and teaching. He’s also the GP Academic Programme Lead for the Integrated Clinical Academic Training programme at Manchester.  

His research focusses on how digital technology and psychological theory can be harnessed to improve patients' experiences of primary care. He has examined quality assurance of mobile health apps, how digital technology can help reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, and explored what patients, carers and healthcare staff want from patient online health records access. His current projects include work on improving patients' and clinicians' experiences of online health records access and developing tools to enhance the impact of this practice.

His research informed NHS England’s ‘Accelerating citizen access to health records’ programme and was used in training materials to help staff transition to this becoming default practice. He is now working alongside the NHS App team, industry, and patient groups to improve how the information in primary care health records is displayed to patients.