The British journal of general practice : the journal of the Royal College of General Practitioners
-
Google searches represent a snapshot of the world's interest in different topics and are reflected by Google Trends (GT). GT has gained recent popularity across various areas of healthcare research of interest to GPs, such as the seasonality of particular physical symptoms and population-level suicide risk. As a real-time data source, GT is appealing to healthcare researchers, but whether it has a place in primary care research remains largely unaddressed. ⋯ GT is an accessible and vast data source. This study demonstrated the potential for GT to play a role in researching health behaviours. However, this study also revealed key limitations of GT, and caution should be exercised by primary care researchers and GPs when using GT for research.
-
Dementia is a rapidly growing problem projected to rise steepest in ethnic minority communities; nearly 600% over 40 years compared to the UK population. Despite this, patients from ethnic minorities are referred less to memory clinics, diagnosed at more advanced stages, and present more often in crisis. ⋯ Participatory action research project using Photovoice qualitative methodology was co-designed with communities. Stakeholders to co-produce complex intervention prototype seeking to improve dementia services for ethnic minority communities.
-
Cancer risk algorithms were introduced to clinical practice in the last decade, but they remain underused. ⋯ Cancer risk algorithms have the potential to impact risk assessment and decision making and may have a role as learning tools. Informing clinicians about their proven usefulness to colleagues may maximise impact.
-
General practice has a diverse training programme. It is majority female (57%) and more than half of all trainees are from an ethnic minority, according to the GMC workforce report 2022. However, we are not seeing the same representation of ethnic minorities in academic general practice, with 85.1% of GP professors being White. ⋯ With such a diverse training scheme, we need to have a better representation of ethnic minorities in GP academia. There is a clear problem recruiting or attracting people from ethnic minorities to an academic career and work needs to be done to understand and overcome those barriers.
-
Since autumn 2022, 6.5% of the newly assigned medical students in Hessia, Germany (Universities of Marburg, Frankfurt, and Gießen) receive admission to medical studies under the condition to pursue their future careers in the field of general practice in a rural area. Students are bound by contract to work in general practice for at least 10 years and will receive special extracurricular training during their studies at the university. Nationally, this system is without comparison. ⋯ We have mainly found similarities on the three main factors in all interviewed groups, yet different perspectives result in varying prioritisations.