Medical Centre

In an article published in the British Medical Journal , I discuss the health outcomes achieved by the NHS in the UK and how these compare with other European countries. Health outcomes in the UK have improved substantially since the NHS was established in 1948. The NHS also performs well in many international comparisons on measures such as efficiency, equity, and access. Despite these achievements, however, problems with health outcomes remain. Moreover, other European countries have also improved their health outcomes in recent decades, often at a faster rate than the UK. Consequently, the UK now lags behind many other European countries in key health outcomes in areas such as child health and cancer survival. I conclude that new health policies in the UK should help the NHS to focus on improving health outcomes and that politically expedient schemes that are not evidence-based – such as extended opening hours in primary care – should be abandoned. Continued progress is also ne...

In a paper published in the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy , we discuss key issues in applying an evidence-based approach to the prescribing of antibiotics to children. Antimicrobial resistance is a growing threat to global health, yet antibiotics are frequently prescribed in primary care for acute childhood illness, where there is evidence of very limited clinical effectiveness. Moral philosophy supports the need for doctors to consider wider society, including future patients, when treating present individuals, and it is clearly wrong to waste antibiotics in situations where they are largely clinically ineffective at the expense of future generations. Doctors should feel confident in applying principles of antibiotic stewardship when treating children in primary care, but they must explain these to parents. Provision of accurate, accessible information about the benefits and harms of antibiotics is key to an ethical approach to antimicrobial stewardship and to supporting ...

In recent years, the NHS has invested in 'extended hours' schemes, whereby general practice are encourage to open beyond their contracted hours of 8am to 6.30pm Monday to Friday. In a study published in the British Journal of General Practice , we examined associations between overall experience of general practice and patient experience of making appointments and satisfaction with opening hours using data from the General Practice Patient Survey. We found that patient experience of making appointments and satisfaction with opening hours were only modestly associated with overall experience. Patient satisfaction was most strongly associated with GP interpersonal quality of care We concluded that policymakers in England should not assume that recent policies to improve access will result in large improvements in patients’ overall experience of general practice. The article was covered by the medical magazine Pulse .

In an article published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine , Paul Jewell and I discuss the issue of foundation doctors and specialist training. Only around 43% of junior doctors entered straight into a UK specialty training programme after completion of their foundation programme in 2017, a substantial decrease from 71% in 2011. Given the National Health Service in the UK is under ever-increasing workforce pressures, this is a worrying trend. The decline in entry to specialty training can be partly explained by the rise in what is known as ‘the F3 year’. Concerns over this ‘junior doctor exodus’ are not new, having been previously raised in 2010, when the figures were far more favourable than they are now. Similar trends can also be seen at earlier stages, with fewer school students applying to medical school, and fewer medical students applying to the foundation programme,4 indicating wider issues. To reverse this trend and the shortage of doctors in many specialties, so...

England is currently experiencing an outbreak of measles, with around 440 laboratory confirmed cases between January to May 2018. The outbreak is linked to ongoing outbreaks in Europe. Most cases are unimmunised teenagers and young adults. Children and young adults who did not receive MMR vaccine when they were younger, and people from under-vaccinated communities, are particularly at high risk. Measles is a highly infectious illness that can sometimes cause serious complications such as pneumonia and encephalitis, and which can occasionally be fatal. Anyone who missed out on their Measles, Mumps and Rubella (MMR) vaccine or is unsure if they had 2 doses should therefore ensure they are fully immunised. The outbreak also reinforces the importance of parents to ensure their children receive two doses of the MMR vaccine, the first at around 12 months of age and the second around 3-4 years of age.

An article from Imperial College London published in the Lancet discusses vaccination from migrants in Europe. Ensuring high levels of coverage is a key priority of the European Vaccine Action Plan, whereby all WHO Europe Member States have committed to eliminating endemic measles and rubella (>95% coverage with the measles mumps rubella vaccine), sustaining polio-free status, and controlling hepatitis B infection.

Our recent paper in BMJ Open Gastroenterology examines trends in endoscopic, medical and surgical admissions for inflammatory bowel disease in England from 2003–2013. In the last decade, there have been major advances in inflammatory bowel disease management but their impact on hospital admissions requires evaluation. We aim to investigate nationwide trends in inflammatory bowel disease surgical/medical elective and emergency admissions, including endoscopy and cytokine inhibitor infusions, between 2003 and 2013. We used Hospital Episode Statistics and population data from the UK Office for National Statistics. Age-sex standardised admission rates increased from 76.5 to 202.9/100 000. Rising inflammatory bowel disease hospital admission rates in the past decade have been driven by an increase in the incidence and prevalence of inflammatory bowel disease. Lower GI endoscopy and surgery rates have fallen, while cytokine inhibitor infusion rates have risen. There has been a concurrent...

Health inequalities start very early in life. By the time of school reception year (4-5 years of age), children from the most deprived areas of England are twice as likely to be obese as children from the most affluent areas. This illustrates the importance of the implementing policies to improve health at a very early stage, starting before conception, continuing through pregnancy, and then into infancy and childhood. See NHS Digital for further details.

Workforce and resource pressures in the UK National Health Service (NHS) mean that it is currently unable to meet patients’ expectations of access to primary care. In an era of near-instant electronic communication, with mobile online access available for most shopping and banking services, many people expect similar convenience in healthcare. Consequently, increasing numbers of web-based and smartphone apps now offer same-day ‘virtual consulting’ in the form of Internet video conferencing with private general practitioners. While affordable and accessible private primary care may be attractive to many patients, the existence of these services raises several questions. A particular concern, given continued development of antimicrobial resistance, is that some companies appear to use ease of access to treatment with antibiotics as an advertising strategy. We examine online video consulting with private general practitioners in the UK, considering its potential impact on patients and ...

In a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine , we discuss the role that clinical pharmacists could play in primary care. Primary care in the United Kingdom’s NHS is in crisis. Systematic underfunding, with specific neglect of primary care compared to other clinical specialties, has combined with ever-rising demand and administrative workload to place a now dwindling workforce under unsustainable pressure. A major factor in the growing workload in primary care is prescribing. An aging population and higher prevalence of chronic diseases is leading to increased case complexity and polypharmacy, and consequently greater potential for prescribing errors. Nearly 5% of all prescriptions in general practices in England have prescribing or monitoring errors, while in some areas up to half of the prescriptions are prone to error. Although most errors are of mild or moderate severity, they can be life-changing for patients and costly for healthcare systems, accountin...

Dr Paul Morgan and I discuss deaths from sepsis in a letter published in the British Medical Journal . NHS England estimates that approximately 37 000 deaths a year are caused by sepsis.[1] This means that in the seven year period between 2011 and 2017, around 259 000 people died from sepsis in England. Only one of these deaths, that of Jack Adcock in Leicester in 2011, has resulted in the conviction of health professionals for manslaughter (Hadiza Bawa-Garba and Isabel Amaro).[2] Sepsis can be difficult to diagnose, and delays and omissions in its diagnosis and treatment contribute to the high death rate. Even the former chair of the General Medical Council, Graham Catto, has admitted that he failed to diagnose sepsis in a timely manner, an error that contributed to a patient’s death.[3] Because of the problems diagnosing and treating sepsis, numerous initiatives have aimed to improve its management in both primary care and hospital settings. Details of one of the most recent of th...

It is often assumed that providing easier access to community-based general practice during evenings and weekends can reduce demand for emergency and other unscheduled care services, promoting more appropriate care and reducing the costs associated with expensive hospital-based treatment. For example, in England’s NHS there is political pressure to expand general practice surgeries’ opening hours to progress towards a ‘seven-day NHS’. When considering extension of primary care opening hours in England, it is useful to compare primary care access across other countries in the European Union. Despite differences in healthcare commissioning and funding, European countries face comparable challenges such as ageing populations and increases in chronic conditions and mental health problems, all of particular relevance to primary care.  In a paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine , we examined England’s current in-hours general practice services relative to tho...

A study published in the journal BMJ Quality and Safety concluded that extending GP opening hours will not ease the rising burden on Accident and Emergency departments. The observational study was led by Imperial College London. Lead author Dr Thomas Cowling from Imperial College's Department of Primary Care and Public Health and colleagues compared patients' experiences of GP surgeries with the number of Accident and Emergency visits in their areas in England from 2011-2012 to 2013-2014. They examined reports from NHS England's annual GP Patient Survey, and included patients registered to 8,124 GP surgeries. We measured levels of patient satisfaction using three factors: the ease of making an appointment, opening hours, and overall experience. They then matched these responses with A&E departments in their area to observe any correlation with the number of visits to A&E. Overall, areas where patients were happier with the ease of making appointments, which coul...

Hospital administrative data, such as those provided by the Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) database in England, are increasingly being used for research and quality improvement. To date, no study has tried to quantify and examine trends in the use of HES for research purposes. We therefore examined trends in the use of HES data for research. Our study was published in the Journal of Innovation in Health Informatics . Publications generated from the use of HES data were extracted from PubMed and analysed. Publications from 1996 to 2014 were then examined further in the Science Citation Index (SCI) of the Thompson Scientific Institute for Science Information (Web of Science) for details of research specialty area. 520 studies, categorised into 44 specialty areas, were extracted from PubMed. The review showed an increase in publications over the 18-year period with an average of 27 publications per year, however with the majority of outputs observed in the latter part of the study p...

Data collected in electronic medical records for a patient in primary care in the United Kingdom can span from birth to death and can have enormous benefits in improving health care and public health, and for research. Several systems exist in the United Kingdom to facilitate the use of research data generated from consultations between primary care professionals and their patients. General Practitioners play a gatekeeper role in the UK’s National Health Service (NHS) because they are responsible for providing primary care services and for referring patients to see specialists. In more recent years, these databases have been supplemented (through data linkage) with additional data from areas such as laboratory investigations, hospital admissions and mortality statistics. Data collected in primary care research databases are now increasingly used for research in many areas, and for providing information on patterns of disease. These databases have clinical and prescription data and c...

On Wednesday 22 November 2017, I spoke at an event organised by the North and West London Faculty of the Royal College of General Practitioners. The event was aimed at ‘First Five’ general practitioners. I spoke on the topic of opportunities in research. The event was chaired by Dr Camille Gajria and Dr Nilesh Bharakhada. Other speakers at the conference included Dr Ian Goodman, Chair Hillingdon CCG, who spoke on the topic of emerging opportunities for GPs through new models of care; Dr Sohail Hussain who spoke on media opportunities; Dr Krishan Aggarwal who spoke on finance; Dr Shivani Tanna who spoke on teaching opportunities; Dr Sonia Tsukagoshi who spoke on international opportunities; and Dr Nilesh Bharakhada who spoke on the Care Information Exchange and opportunities in technology for GPs. The event was a good opportunity for First Five GPs to learn about career opportunities in London and also update themselves on areas such as personal finance and key developments in the NHS ...

In a study published in BMJ Safety and Quality , we evaluated mortality differences between weekend and weekday emergency stroke admissions in England over time. We aimed to determine whether a reconfiguration of stroke services in Greater London was associated with a change in this mortality difference. We extracted patient-level data from national routinely collected administrative data (Hospital Episode Statistics or HES) from 1 January 2008 to 31 December 2014. Records include information of all admissions to English National Health Service (NHS) hospital trusts. Each patient record contains information on demographics (such as sex, age and ethnicity), the episode of care (such as trust name, date of admission) and diagnosis. Our study covers a 30-month period before (January 2008 to June 2010) the reorganisation of stroke service in Greater London, and a 54-month period afterwards (July 2010 to December 2014). All admissions during the same period in the rest of England were ...

General practices in England are independent businesses that are contracted to provide primary care for specified populations. Most are owned by general practitioners, but many types of organisation are now eligible to deliver these services. In a study published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine , we examined the association between patient experience and the contract type of general practices in England, distinguishing limited companies from other practices. We analysed data from the English General Practice Patient Survey 2013–2014 (July to September 2013 and January to March 2014). Patients were eligible for inclusion in the survey if they had a valid National Health Service number, had been registered with a general practice for six months or more, and were aged 18 years or over. All general practices in England with eligible patients were included in the survey (n = 8017). Patients registered to general practices owned by limited companies reported worse experi...

Members of the School of Public Health held a very productive and informative meeting today with senior members of Imperial College including Sarah Waterbury, Vice President (Advancement); Maggie Dallman, Associate Provost (Academic Partnerships); Angela Bowen, Director of Development (Faculty of Medicine); and Tom Pearson, Head of Special Projects (Academic Partnerships). The Department of Primary Care & Public Health in the School of Public Health works with local community stakeholders – such as voluntary groups, local authorities, and general practitioners – on a range of community-based outreach projects. These projects aim to improve the health and wellbeing of local residents; improve access to professional careers for children from deprived backgrounds; and give medical students experience of working with deprived and marginalised groups to develop skills in health coaching and behavioural change. This work is in addition to the very high-quality teaching and research ...

Data collected in electronic medical records for a patient in primary care can span from birth to death and can have enormous benefits in improving health care and public health, and for research. Several systems exist in the United Kingdom (UK) to facilitate the use of research data generated from consultations between primary care professionals and their patients. In a study published in the  Journal of Innovation in Health Informatics , we carried out a bibliometric review to analyse the research outputs and the longitudinal growth in the number of publications that harness the three main UK primary care databases: CPRD, QResearch and THIN. These databases collectively produced 1,296 publications over a ten-year period, with CPRD producing 63.6% (n=825 papers), THIN 30.4% (n=394) and QResearch 5.9% (n=77). Pharmacoepidemiology and General Medicine were the most common specialities featured. The growth in publications from these databases shows that they are making an im...