Medical Centre

Congratulations to Dr Josip Car and his team at NHS Hammersmith & Fulham for their work on the  QOF Plus programme , which won the Award for Primary Care and Community Based Integration at the 2010 London Health and Social Care Awards. QOF Plus was developed jointly by the  eHealth Unit  at the  Department of Primary Care and Public Health  at Imperial and NHS Hammersmith and Fulham. QOF Plus adopts a multi-modal approach based on: Strong clinical leadership and shared ownership through clinical engagement and stakeholder panels Targeted training and support  Innovative funding, financial and other incentives  Rigorous concurrent evaluation which feeds into constant self-improvement of the programme Competitive motivation using dedicated software analysis tools to allow regular performance review, benchmarking and prediction of end-of-year performance Patient-level management tools to assist practices in identifying th...

Statistical genetics is a rapidly developing field that is producing models and methods for the analysis and interpretation of genetic data. Recent advances in new biotechnologies are generating detailed maps of genetic data are leading to potentially major developments in our understanding  of the genetic basis of health and disease. An example of research in this area is a paper published recently by one of our statisticians, Dr Utz Pape , in the journal Nature . In the paper, Dr Pape and his colleagues investigated the link between an genetically-linked enzyme defect and myeloid cancers.

An article published recently in the London Journal of Primary Care examined recent changes in the health system in Taiwan. Taiwan adopted a national health insurance system in 1995. Hence, both the British and the Taiwanese health systems are single-payment systems that offer universal coverage. However, the method of funding is different as the UK system is tax based, and the Taiwan system us other insurance-premium based. Now in its second decade, the National Health Insurance scheme in Taiwan continues to achieve high satisfaction rates among the Taiwanese people. Based on public opinion polls held by the Bureau of NHI, the overall satisfaction rate has consistently been over 70%.11 The next major challenge for the Taiwanese government is to improve quality of care while keeping national healthcare expenditure under control, and dealing with the rising number of older people in the Taiwanese population.

The National Institute for Health Research Collaboration for Leadership for Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) for Northwest London recently held a networking event to explore potential links between the NW London CLAHRC and GP Consortia in London. Amongst the speakers were myself; David Stout, Director of the Primary Care Trust Network, NHS Confederation; Dr Alan Cohen, Director of Primary Care, West London Mental Health Trust; Professor Derek Bell, Director, NIHR CLAHRC for Northwest London; and Ganesh Sathyamoorthy, Head of Operations and Delivery, NIHR CLAHRC for Northwest London. My talk at this meeting was on what role public health specialists could play in the new GP consortia. There are a number of areas in which public health specialists could support the new GP consortia, including needs assessment, planning health services, implementing preventive health care programmes, and evaluation of new programmes.