Aisha Malik is a sessional GP in Manchester and a social media strategist for doctors and healthcare organisations. She is the founder of Doctors in Business, an organisation which aims to get doctors more visible online. In this episode she explains how a traumatic early experience in general practice (which saw her practice rated as one of the worst in the country by the CQC) eventually led to an interest in the ways that social media can influence patient behaviour and contribute to practice success.

Dr Hussein Gandhi (aka Dr Gandalf) and Dr Andy Foster are two GPs who run the eGPLearning Podblast. The Podblast explores new resources for primary care health tech, current news and covers regular interviews with health tech innovators. In this episode Ben asks Andy and Gandhi what impact they think technology is having on general practice; both now and in the future.

Ishani Patel is a GP partner in North West London and co-founder of Lantum a company formed “to help healthcare professionals unlock the complexity of staffing in today’s healthcare system” and part of the NHS Innovation Accelerator. Lantum have created a technological platform to support workforce mobilisation which is delivering a number of benefits including reducing agency spend, saving managers around four hours a week, improving fill-rate and even extending GP careers. In this episode Ishani explains, amongst other things, how the platform works, how it supports at-scale working and how it is likely to develop in the future.

Vincent Buscemi is a health and social care lawyer and a partner at Bevan Brittan, a leading commercial law firm. Vincent has wide experience of advising independent and public sector organisations on a wide range of issues including powers, decision-making and governance arrangements. In this episode Vincent takes Ben through the fine detail of setting up limited companies, forming “back-office” hubs and avoiding the potential pitfalls of both.

Regular listeners will know Dr Mark Newbold well. He is the Managing Director of Our Health Partnership (OHP), the Birmingham and Shropshire based super-practice covering 38 practices and a population of over 340,000. We have been following the progress of OHP since we began the podcast and you can find the previous episodes here: Episode 79, Episode 41 and Episode 13. In this new episode, two years on from the formation of OHP, Mark describes how the partnership is developing, how practices are being engaged, the development of their seven localities, their major integration project and their approach to risk…and much more.

Rachel Morris is a GP who works for Red Whale (“one of the leading providers of primary care medical education in the UK”) In this podcast Rachel describes two courses that Red Whale run aimed at developing leadership skills in primary care leaders. The first is Lead. Manage. Thrive! - a very popular one day course in management skills for GPs. The second is a new course on Working At Scale. Rachel explains how and why the programmes were developed, who the training is aimed at and what the courses cover.

Phil Coates is a practice management consultant and an expert on the new General Data Protection Regulation which comes into force on 25th May 2018. In this podcast Phil explains how the GDPR will impact on general practices and what practices should be doing now to prepare. He covers the new roles required by the regulation and offers a number of places where practices can find additional support.

Judith Harvey writes regularly for the National Association of Sessional GPs newsletter and other GP publications. Her articles have now been gathered into a recently published book; Perspectives. Judith’s interests range from the Cuban health system (she founded the charity Cuba Medical Link to enable students to travel to Cuba for their electives) to self-prescribing by GPs and from her own experiences with concussion to the social pressure put on potential organ donors. Ben talks to Judith about her life, her career and her writing.

Amer Sheikh is the musculo-skeletal clinical lead for North West Surrey CCG and Surrey Heartlands STP. He also runs a musculo-skeletal and chronic pain course for Red Whale (of GP-Update fame). In this podcast he describes how, in North West Surrey, they were able to introduce a new model of musculo-skeletal care by putting more resources into the start of the patient journey and so reduce delays and the need for surgery.

We follow up Episode 102 with the second part of our panel discussion on technology. Five nationally renowned practitioners with an interest in new technology look at how technology is shaping the future of general practice. In this final part of the discussion they focus their discussions on virtual and augmented reality, some of the ethical issues and how practices should be preparing now for the digital future.