The Royal College of General Practitioners is the largest membership organisation in the United Kingdom solely for GPs. Founded in 1952, it has over 46,000 members who are committed to improving patient care, developing their own skills and promoting general practice as a discipline. We are an independent professional body with enormous expertise in patient–centred generalist clinical care. Thr...

OBJECTIVE To design and validate a new competency based selection system to recruit general practice registrars, comprising a competency based application form, referees' reports, and an assessment centre. DESIGN Longitudinal predictive validity study and a matched case comparison. SETTING South Yorkshire and East Midlands region, United Kingdom, comprising three deaneries. PARTICIPANTS 4...

A survey of general practice in the London borough of Lambeth was analysed to discover how the distance from a patient's home to a medical facility affects the utilisation of that facility. It was shown that distance has a negative effect on utilisation for all population groups except men aged 15 to 64. The effect was especially marked for women, for the elderly, and for Social Classes III, IV...

BACKGROUND Managers in general practice perform a variety of roles, from purely administrative to higher-level strategic planning. There has been little research investigating in detail how they perform these roles and the problems that they encounter. The new General Medical Services (GMS) contract contains new management challenges and it is not clear how practices will meet these. AIM To i...

Certain sociological problems are less likely than others to be studied through primary field research. Some deal with topics that do not seem important enough to warrant the expense of a full-scale field inquiry; others treat subjects about which most people believe the facts are known; some involve events and opinions in the past which cannot be measured among current populations. Under these...

The spectrum of massless Dirac fermions on the surface a topological insulator in perpendicular magnetic field B contains B-independent “zeroth Landau level”, protected by chiral symmetry. If equation is discretized lattice method “Wilson fermions”, symmetry broken and zeroth level broadened when has spatial fluctuations. We show how this artefact can be avoided starting from an alternative non...

OBJECTIVES To explore stakeholders' perceptions of learners teaching (near-peer teaching) in general practice in order to inform training policy. DESIGN Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with 29 general practice stakeholders. Interviews continued until data saturation was reached. Transcribed interviews underwent thematic analysis. SETTING Nine general practices in NSW, ...

BACKGROUND Increasing demands on general practice to manage chronic disease may warrant organisational change at the practice level. Staff's readiness for organisational change can act as a facilitator or barrier to implementing interventions aimed at organisational change. OBJECTIVES To explore general practice staff readiness for organisational change and its association with staff and prac...

BACKGROUND Capacity for teaching in general practice clinics is limited. Shared learning sessions are one form of vertically integrated teaching that may ameliorate capacity constraints. METHODS This study sought to understand the perceptions of general practitioner supervisors, learners and practice staff of the facilitators of shared learning in general practice clinics. Using a grounded th...

During 1979-80 an experimental preregistration house physician post in general practice was conducted at Aldermoor Health Centre in Southampton in rotation with medical posts at Southampton General Hospital. Ten house physicians took part in the experiment that lasted for 19 months and each doctor spent two months in general practice. The house physicians settled quickly into general practice a...