RCGP Heritage

RCGP Heritage

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RCGP Heritage episodes

  • Portfolio Career - HSL
    The timing’s fascinating.  I applied to be Chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges in early February 2020, and the results of the election was announced, either the 8th or 9th April 2020, by which time we were in lockdown… So, when I, so in March 2020, I was working, I was doing a few more sessions in general practice as a stepping stone, until I quite knew what was working out, I was back at the University of Birmingham, so I’d gone back and I was doing a series of projects with them as my life worked out… but I was also throwing myself into the work establishing the National Academy for Social Prescribing, and in fact, we launched, the official launch of the National Academy of Social Prescribing was on the 12th March 2020, and we held it in the South Bank Centre and Matt Hancock, the Secretary of State then,.. he came and launched it and we were on tenterhooks, should we or shouldn’t we cancel the event.  Would he or wouldn’t he turn up… He came and he did the event… and we spoke briefly about what was happening,.. and he looked me in the eye and he said, “I’m not sure when we’ll next do anything face to face.” 
    2 min
  • JCVI - AH
    Of course, the majority of vaccines are delivered in primary care, and they have been all the way along, and actually, the common sense and the understanding the practicalities and how it will all be viewed by the profession has been really important…  Myself and possibly the lay person on the, on the JCVI are very practically orientated, and I think that helps shape key decisions because they’re, often these decisions, they’re not based purely, purely on the rigour of the science, but it’s a mixture of science and practicality.  So, so I think it’s been really, really important to keep this committee grounded, and to help shape key decisions to, to have a GP on that committee, and I know that they appreciate it.  I think because I have been on it so long, I’m quite, and because I’ve, you know, I’m an academic myself, and published over 100 academic papers, and got credibility, um, I think I can combine that GP common sense with the science credibility and actually hold my own and know what to sway key arguments in the direction which I think they are best, best, they best go.  So, so, yeah, I think incredibly important to have a GP on the Committee – I think they always will have a GP on the Committee… It’s an interesting role, it’s an important role because we are a key advisory role to government. 
    2 min
  • NHS England Vaccination - JL
    If we have a vaccine, what are we going to do, how are we going to deliver this? And, essentially, I was approached whether or not I’d become the NHS Medical director for Covid vaccine, what August/September 2020… At that stage we didn’t have a vaccine – we hoped we would, and everybody just worked absolutely flat out, people put their lives on hold, in order to be able to deliver what we saw was a potentially huge life-saving public health initiative… They set up a logistics chain in a couple of weeks, with really complicated just-in-time and temperature requirements that was more complicated than many supermarket chains.   
    2 min
  • Older men standing at podiums telling the public what to do may be ineffective or counterproductive - CG
    I think, uh, in retrospect, having a whole line-up of older scientific, older men telling the public what to do,  
    really works to be honest.  I know they weren’t all men, but they were predominantly men and I go back to where I started, I think GPs are trusted…  We can communicate around complex issues.  During the pandemic, I was often asked to go on the radio with a serious expert,.. and the serious expert would be asked a question, give a perfectly legitimate answer, then I would say ‘What he means is’… I think that’s what we should learn from this is to put generalists together with the specialists, and even though I knew a tenth or even a hundredth of what the specialist knew, a hundredth of a percent, I was able to communicate it because I am so used to communicating… every seven to ten minutes… Messages have to be given very simply… I wish we’d had more, sort of, women giving the messages, less standing up, less podium work… The people have a great appetite to be taken with rather than spoken at… I think the College was a very trusted voice, throughout the pandemic, certainly for general practice it was – we relied on it…     
    2 min
  • College Exam - AW
    GPs are about listening to patients, listening to the story, thinking of what might be wrong, making sure you’re not missing anything important, etc, and this exam did that, it just did that.   So, you asked me about pre-Covid, that’s how it went pre-Covid working in this building, in this exam centre fit for purpose, with three circuits running at the same time...  But we’ve moved away from that...  Um, general practice has moved on, it’s become more involving IT, phone consultations, more video consultations, more face to face with patients using video in a way that ten years ago would have been unimaginable...   Because, I think, general practice is inevitably changed with Covid, and will never return to pre-Covid days, just as we can’t go back to the 1950s, when the GP would be on-call every night of the week – medicine has changed greatly, over the time – we’ve had to move on, the exam has had to adapt to that. 
    2 min
  • Pandemic preparedness and College resilience - SM
    We’ve always been aware that pandemics can happen.  I don’t think anyone envisaged the scale of this.  I don’t think anyone really thought this would happen, and it was really quite a shock to the system for everyone I think…  Yeah, I think definitely there have been some lessons learned, um, and when we formed our own small group within the College, the first thing we did was we wanted to get people who had previous experience in, and we wanted to get young people in, who had no experience… That’s how you keep the institutional memory really by involving some younger members as well as some more experienced members – so we particularly brought back, uh, Maureen Baker, a former chair of the College, but Maureen had been the Swine Flu lead for the College previously, so she, she’d had the expertise around the swine flu pandemic,.. so we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel.  
    2 min
  • College Roles - MM
    As general practice changes, as we shift our model from being all things to all people to identifying where we really add value, there’s growing evidence that general practice’s contribution to the health improvement agenda is very substantive, so I’d be confident that there’s a growing number of patients who understand that, and wider system leaders, and policy makers who understand that as well…  I think popu-, the importance of population health, and addressing health inequalities is, is recognised much more by government than it’s ever been, and recognised much more by other branches of the medical profession… I think we have to remember that our principle, um, responsibility as GPs is to the individual patient in front of us – that’s really important, we mustn’t lose that.  But it doesn’t have to be either or
    1 min
  • Importance of Research - LD
    So, beforehand, GPs, and again still, GPs didn’t get the… same opportunities as their hospital counterparts, and a big reason for that is GP specialty training is three years (ST1, 2, 3) whereas hospitals can extend theirs – so if you’re a cardiologist and you want to go into clinical research in cardiology, you can extend your specialty training to ST8, ST9 and still have a secure environment to do that.  So, quite a few of our GP colleagues were making, were playing a really vital role through the Panoramic trial, through researching vaccines, uh, and demographic data and so on.  So, I think the value of GP research, hopefully, will be, will be recognised and the system amended to enable them to play their part.
    1 min
  • BJGP - PE
    I think the College has played a seminal role in primary care research...  One by espousing it as really important – having a journal, a Journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners as it was in those days, and the British Journal of General practice, which is now the highest ranked, in this year that we’re speaking, the highest ranked primary care journal in the world, so I think that’s a real tribute to the College really espousing research as part of the discipline of general practice… and increasingly we’re trying to get research as part of a, part of core care and the pandemic has amplified that as well. 
    1 min

About RCGP Heritage

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The Royal College of General Practitioners was founded in 1952 to raise standards within the profession.  It has the largest membership of the medical Royal Colleges and passing its rigorous membership examination is now compulsory for all aspiring General Practitioners.