GP Teaching

The Undergraduate Primary Care Education Team held its Annual Teachers Conference on Wednesday 15 September. This was the first time the conference has been held online. The conference was open to everyone who has contributed to teaching our medical students or plans to get involved in teaching and we were pleased to be able to welcome more than 100 delegates from all over the United Kingdom.

We were delighted to have Dr Farzana Hussain as our keynote speaker. Dr Hussain is GP principal at The Project Surgery and Primary Care Network Clinical Director for Newham Central and was named as the Pulse GP of the Year in 2019. She gave an inspiring and insightful talk on the challenges of balancing work with our communities, so we have happier doctors and healthcare staff and happier communities, at a time when the NHS is shifting to becoming a well-being rather than a “treating sickness” service and our workforce is stretched.

The presentations from our medical students have always proved one of the highlights of the conference in the past and despite the change of platform, this year was no different. Shahmeer Mohammad presented his experiences on the new I-Explore module and student shaper Kinan Wihba gave his perspective on Shaping An Inclusive Primary Care Curriculum.

Three pairs of Community Action Project students, winners from each term, presented their interventions. The delegates were asked to vote on which they thought was the best project overall and this was awarded to Thivyaa Gangatharan and Ellen Wrathall for their intervention aiding parents, carers and GPs in accessing Child Mental Health Services in Greenwich.

The delegates then broke out into workshops. This year these took on a variety of topics: creating an inclusive learning environment, make live online teaching great again, coaching skills, balancing clinical and teaching responsibilities, professional identity formation and graphic medicine.

After a break, students from across all years of teaching were awarded prizes and this was followed by our tutor awards. Many congratulations to Dr Tamara Joffe and Church End Medical Centre (Practice Award) who won Teaching Excellence Awards, Dr Adnan Saad and Dr Akbar Khan for their Supporting the Student Experience Awards and Dr Heather Molyneux who received the Outstanding Contribution to Teaching Award.

We also ran, as every year, a photography competition for final year students on their GP placements outside of London. You may see a selection of entries in the following post: https://blogs.imperial.ac.uk/gp-teaching/2021/10/01/annual-teachers-conference-year-6-gpsa-photography-prize-2021/