CaHRU presents at European Forum for Primary Care Conference in Amsterdam

EFPC-logo-4-k new versionMembers of CaHRU, Dr Coral Sirdifield, Ana Godoy and Prof Niro Siriwardena attended the annual conference of the European Forum for Primary Care (EFPC), ‘Integrated primary care: research, policy and practice’, at the Tobacco Museum in Amsterdam from 30 August to 1 September 2015 to meet with colleagues and present an invited workshop on patient experience at the meeting. Niro Siriwardena is a member of the advisory board of the EFPC and attended a board meeting on the day before the conference.

Coral Ana Niro3The workshop, entitled ‘QUALICOPC in the UK, the patient perspective, took place on the first afternoon of the conference and was informed by work from CaHRU on the EU funded Quality and Costs of Primary Care in Europe (QUALICOPC) study. The session was well attended, enabling participants to discuss different approaches for measuring patient satisfaction with primary care and how satisfaction could be improved. Coral and Ana presented an innovative approach called Importance-Performance Analysis, using the QUALICOPC data from England, to demonstrate how the technique could help practitioners, researchers and policy makers to identify where one most needed to focus to improve patient satisfaction.

riverboatThe conference included excellent keynotes from Prof Chris van Weel, Emeritus Professor of General Practice at Nijmegen (‘The history of Dutch General Practice or: how Primary Care saved the nation’), Dr Isabel Moulon from the European Medicine Agency (‘Bridging the gap between medicine development and clinical practice: is primary care out of the picture?’), Ellen Nolte from the European Observatory on Health Systems and Policies (‘Integrating care: what we know and what we do not know’), Prof John Øvretveit of the Karolinska Institute (‘Priorities for actionable research to speed and spread improvements in caring for chronic illnesses’), Dr Tonka Poplas Susič and Metka Žitnik Šircelj (‘Model practices in family medicine in Slovenia’) and a closing summary from Prof Marc Bruijnzeels of the Jan van Es Institute (‘Challenges for the future of integrated primary care’). A range of parallel research, debate and workshop sessions, lunch on a riverboat and an excellent conference dinner provided a full, interesting and enjoyable programme for delegates.

Quality and Costs of Primary Care in Europe (QUALICOPC)

Funded by the European Commission, awarding €62,000. Key contact: Coral Sirdifield.

VLUU L110, M110  / Samsung L110, M110The QUALICOPC study crosses over 30 European countries and aims to investigate which aspects of the structure and organisation of primary care are the most important in promoting service quality and equity while minimising costs. A team from CaHRU are running the UK section of this study.
qualicopc_logoGP practices have been recruited from across the East Midlands and South Yorkshire region. Each practice was asked to complete a fieldworker questionnaire, a GP questionnaire, and questionnaires on patient values and experiences. Through this we hope to increase understanding of the variety of ways in which primary care is structured and organised in these regions, and to increase understanding of patients’ experiences of accessing primary care services and which aspects of care they particularly value.

Seminar – Insomnia and sleeping tablets: a European perspective – 30 March 2011

At a well-attended seminar on 30th March, academics from Universities of Ghent and Antwerp in Belgium presented at University of Lincoln.

Sibyl Anthierens (medical sociologist working at the University of Antwerp) presented on “Benzodiazepines: sleeping through the problem”. This included works on the perceptions of general practitioners, patients and nurses on initiating (or avoiding) benzodiazepines in primary care.

This was followed by Thoen Anke (general practitioner) speaking about e-learning, specifically an interactive e-module including several tools and interventions useful within a benzodiazepine-consultation to support GPs.

Prof Thierry Christiaens (general practitioner, clinical pharmacologist and professor of general practice) then described an experimental real-life training programme set up with a simulation patient to look at the effect of possible interventions/tools within a benzodiazepine consultation.

Finally, Hanne Creupelandt (clinical psychologist) spoke about interactive meetings taking place with GPs in local quality groups discussing the non- pharmacological approach of insomnia, anxiety, stress and benzodiazepine withdrawal.

Good working links have been formed with our European colleagues in Belgium particularly in the area of insomnia and benzodiazepines and we plan to build on this with future work.