MedicsVoices

Glenn Colquhoun is a GP, poet, and children's writer. His first collection The art of walking upright won the Jessie Mackay best first book of poetry award at the 2000 Montana book awards. Playing God, his third collection, won the poetry section of the same awards in 2003 as well as the reader's choice award that year. He was awarded the Prize in modern letters in 2004 and a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard University in 2010. In 2012 he was part of the ‘Transit of Venus’ poetry exchange at the Frankfurt book fair and in 2014 represented New Zealand on the Commonwealth Poets United poetry project which celebrated the Glasgow Commonwealth Games that year. His latest collection of poetry The Ballad of Joe Taihape was published in 2026. He works as a GP in Horowhenua.

Hamish Wilson is a GP and nearly retired Associate Professor at Otago Medical School, Dunedin, NZ.

 From 1996, he taught in the Diploma/Masters programme for GPs, leading the the ‘nature’ or philosophy paper. From 2008, he introduced undergraduate medical students to community-based, experiential learning and reflective practice. He is a qualified Balint Group leader and co-leads the reflective essay competition for medical students in Australasia. With Wayne Cunningham, he published ‘Being a Doctor: Understanding Medical Practice’ (2013) that explored some of the clinical challenges for GPs and other clinicians. He is now writing a second book on emerging approaches to functional illness or persistent physical symptoms.

Robert F Woollard is Emeritus Professor of Family Practice at the University of British Columbia. He has extensive national and international experience in the fields of medical education, social accountability of medical schools, ecosystem approaches to health, and sustainable development.

In this he has or is holding leadership roles in the CFPC, CMA, AFMC, AMEE, and The Network TUFH. He is actively involved in Nepal with a national medical school, school of public health and a nursing school founded on the principles of social accountability established through his initial feasibility study. He Chairs the International Advisory Board (IAB) for the newly established University of Nepal (Dec. 2024) a new public liberal arts university. His work in East Africa and Asia is centered on matters of social accountability, primary care, rural health and accreditation systems.

Dr. Woollard co-chairs the Global Consensus on Social Accountability for Medical Schools (GCSA) and does extensive work in this area with many international bodies. He was a lead organizer for the World Summit on Social Accountability that led to the Tunis Declaration  and recently chaired the Scientific Committee for TUFH2022 the annual conference  of this network devoted to social justice and health, leading to the declaration https://thenetworktufh.org/tufh-2022- declaration/

He has engaged in a range of grant supported work including the establishment of CoPEH-Canada and the five year ECHO project on watershed scale integration of environmental, community and health. As an Associate Director of the Rural Coordination Centre of BC (RCCbc) he provided central leadership in the development of a Canadian national strategy for addressing educational and service needs for surgical and obstetrical services in rural Canada in particular Aboriginal service access for birthing. And, has worked in many areas to reduce racism in BC’s health system. Above all he is a husband, father, and grandfather.

General Practitioner, clinical trialist, and listener, interpreter and teller of stories.A GP by background, Chris Butler is Professor of Primary Care, Director of the University of Oxford Primary Care Clinical Trials Unit, and Senior Research Fellow at Trinity College, University of Oxford.His training and experience span the University of Cape Town, Cecilia Makiwane Hospital (Mdantsane), McMaster University, the University of Wales College of Medicine, and the University of Toronto—bringing a global, clinical practice-embedded perspective to the design and delivery of clinical trials.He has led the design and delivery of more than 30 randomised trials, including the 10-country PRUDENCE point-of-care diagnostics trial and the 8-country ECRAID-Prime adaptive platform trial—providing practical insights into designing, governing, and delivering studies across diverse health systems.Chris has helped pioneer pragmatic, “democratised” trial methods, exemplified by the UK National Urgent Public Health trials PRINCIPLE and PANORAMIC. Together, these trials randomised over 40,000 participants and evaluated nine treatments for COVID-19, generating transferable lessons on adaptive design, rapid recruitment, research equity, and evidence generation at scale.He is currently co-leading the EU-funded ECRAID-Prime adaptive platform trial in acute respiratory infections across eight European countries, as well as the SHIELD-1 trial evaluating peginterferon lambda-1a for viral infections.

Tim Stokes is the Elaine Gurr Professor of General Practice at the Department of Primary Care, Otago School of Medicine, based at the Dunedin campus, New Zealand.He is an academic general practitioner with a particular interest in health care delivery and implementation research, using a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. His particular interests are in rural health services and health systems, evaluating complex health system interventions, and new ways of delivering health services for acute and chronic clinical conditions in primary care and across the primary/community – secondary care interface He was a member of NZ’s Pharmaceutical Management Agency (PHARMAC) Pharmacology and Therapeutics Advisory Group (PTAC) from 2016 to 2022. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Primary Health Care, and Past President, Australasian Association for Academic Primary Care (AAAPC)He was previously Senior Clinical Lecturer in Primary Care, University of Birmingham 2013–2014; Consultant Clinical Adviser, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Leicester and Leeds 2006–2013, and Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in General Practice, University of Leicester, UK 1997–2006.

David Loxterkamp’s work as a family physician was the subject of a 1998 Life Magazine photoessay, “What makes a good doctor?” , an NBC Nightline documentary in 2000, and the 2015 PBS documentary “Rx: The Quiet Revolution” by award-winning film-maker David Grubin.David Loxterkamp, M.D. is a family physician who has made his home in Belfast, Maine for the last 41 years, along with his wife, Lindsay. They have two children, Clare and John, who live nearby. His stories and essays have appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of the American Medical Association, the British Medical Journal, and the Annals of Family Medicine. He has authored A Measure of My Days: The Journal of a Country Doctor (University of New England Press, 1997) and What Matters in Medicine: Lessons from a Life in Primary Care (University of Michigan Press, 2013), and has contributed to several anthologies, including including A Life in Medicine, edited by Robert Coles and Randy Testa (The New Press, 2002) and The Country Doctor Revisited: A Twenty-First Century Reader, edited by Therese Zink (Kent State University Press, 2010).David grew up in rural Iowa, attended Creighton University and The University of Iowa College of Medicine, completed his family medicine residency in York, PA ((1982), earned an MA in the Social Sciences at the University of Chicago (1984) and a fellowship in Family Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco (1994). He is is co-founder of Seaport Community Health Center and its Recovery Program. interests include running, choral music, local history, architecture, and potato farming.

Jim Dickinson is a Family Physician and Professor at the Department of Family Medicien at the University of Calgary. After medical training from Queensland University, Australia, he trained in Family Medicine at McMaster University, Canada, then a Kellogg Fellowship at McGill University in Canada. He returned to Australia and wrote his PhD on Preventive Activities in General Practice, while working in General Practice and as a Fellow at Newcastle University. Subsequently he was the first advisor in General Practice to the Australian Department of Health in Canberra, then held chairs in the University of Western Australia and Chinese University of Hong Kong. He returned to Canada in 2002, and been at the University of Calgary since then, 

He has had a long-term interest in prevention and screening, and has contributed to provincial and national screening program committees, and was appointed to the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care from 2009 to 2016. He runs the Alberta sentinel practice program for surveillance of respiratory virus disease in the Alberta community, the TARRANT program. He also researches antibiotic use in community practice and writes about health care policy. 

Professor Richard Baker, Emeritus Professor, and First Head of the Department of Health Sciences at the University of Leicester, 2003 – 2010.  He was Director of the NIHR CLAHRC for LNR, 2008 - 2013.Richard is an academic general practitioner with continuing research interests in the effect of primary health care on population mortality. He was a general practitioner first in Cheltenham 1977 to 1992, and then in Leicester City 1992 to 2013. and an academic at Bristol and then Leicester Universities. His past research has focused on the quality of care, and included methods of clinical audit, clinical governance, and guideline development and implementation. He also undertook research into patient experience of general practice, interventions to improve the quality of care, development of guidelines (with NICE), continuity of care and the outcomes of primary health care. He has also undertaken investigations of patterns of mortality.

Professor Ngaire Kerse is the Joyce Cook Chair in Ageing Well and a Professor of General Practice and Primary Health Care at the University of Auckland. She is a practicing GP at the Auckland City Mission. Since 2010 she has been co-principal investigator of a longitudinal study – Life and Living in Advanced Age: a Cohort Study in New Zealand (LiLACs NZ). She was listed in the New Year’s Honours as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. After training in primary care in New Zealand, Australia, and the USA, completing a Geriatric Medicine Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD at the University of Melbourne, she has built a programme of research promoting activity and function in residential care, residential care organisational culture and outcomes, promoting physical activity in community dwelling older people, activity for depression in the very old, staying upright (preventing falls and injury) in older people in all settings, improving prescribing in primary care, and a large cohort of Māori and non-Māori in advanced age.

I’m Emilie Couchman, and today I am talking with Professor George Freeman, an academic GP in Southampton for 20 years, then Imperial College London, and part-time in a West London practice until 2010. Now retired from clinical practice, George continues to engage in academic work that aligns with continuity and generalism; in his mind, the two key cornerstones of general practice. “Back in Southampton we academics were all part-timers in a ‘most peculiar practice’. Resulting continuity problems led to my MD thesis on Continuity of Care in General Practice, ongoing international work on continuity and eventually membership of the RCGP Commission on Generalism. Relationship continuity links directly with access, consultation length and patient enablement. Patients and professionals must trade-off seeing the right person against waiting for them. Ongoing NHS challenges, mostly stemming from underfunding general practice, threaten both continuity and generalism.” George is a keen organist, travelling regularly to tickle the ivories of many organs around the world. He has a passion for steam trains, and volunteers at Didcot Railway Centre in Oxfordshire.