By Dr Georgina Neve
A large number of the Primary Care department attended the SAPC South East Regional Meeting, held once again at the wonderful setting of Madingley Hall, Cambridge. The theme of this year’s conference, hosted by King’s College, was ‘Digital Features in Primary Care?’ Note the question mark.
We heard from Professor Chris Salisbury, past chair of the RCGP, who raised some concerns about digital health looking at some of the hype and the cons as well as a few pros. Dr Shubs Upadhyay spoke to us about his experience with developing a podcast and designing healthcare apps. Dr Zoe Williams educated us on the world of health and wellbeing apps, encouraging us to both use these ourselves and promote them to our patients. Professor Martin Marshall addressed the conference on the topic of re-thinking medicine, discussing the role of social prescribing and the community.
Imperial had many abstracts accepted for presentation this year – it was hard to keep track! Neepa Thacker, clinical teaching fellow, and Joanne Winning, Director for Medical Humanities at Birkbeck Centre, presented their work on humanities and medical education which stimulated a lot of exciting discussion. One of our medical students, Saniya Mediratta, presented alongside two UCL students on the collaborative work they have been doing on ‘The Hidden Curriculum’, an ethnographic study describing the student perspective on a career in General Practice.
Nadine Engineer, faculty development manager, presented her work around online learning tools for GP undergraduate tutors. Sonia Kumar spoke passionately about social accountability and rethinking how we educate medical students on this topic. Georgina Neve, academic clinical fellow, presented and demonstrated an artificial intelligence chatbot designed to support medical students. Edward Maile, academic clinical fellow, delivered a presentation on the impact of mergers describing ten lessons learned from a merger at Oxford University. Viral Thakerar, course lead, and Tom Durley, primary care executive officer, delivered a workshop on creating a digital learning resource from scratch – ‘Doodles to Digital’ – which was well attended and well received.
Overall the conference was an excellent two days with fascinating presentations from a range of institutions. We look forward to applying all that we learnt to our own student teaching and education research.