This project is part of the work Sam Finnikin and I are doing as part of our fellowship in Evidence and Values at the RCGP. 

Essentially: 

General practice has seen so many re-disorganisations, contracts, changes and pressures…as well as added workload, and many of us are struggling to love/ do the job we love well.

General practice at its’ best is brilliant. But it is also hard going. Some of what we are doing is low value to patients and to us …if we don’t challenge that, and concentrate on what’s  worthwhile instead, we will sink. 

One of the themes of discussion in the overdiagnosis group has been to think about what we value most as general practitioners, and how little this is flagged as important and worth preserving. The same goes for patients: we might hear about what is valued but it’s rarely counted, and if we don’t document it we can’t make a case to preserve it. 

So: we hope this project might help. 

We want to ask at least 100 GPs what they value about their work, and at least 100 patients what they value about their GP. 

We are asking people to submit a 30-seconds-or-less video selfie of themselves saying what they value. 

It does not have to be polished or perfect. We want real people saying real things. 

We want to hear from young people, old people, people with special needs, people with disabilities…we do not want or need any details of health conditions or why you have seen your GP – just what you value, what you want to keep, what you want to ensure the NHS keeps to its’ heart. 

We want to hear from GPs who are at the beginning and middle and end of their careers, GPs who work in rural settings, urban settings, in drug and alcohol clinics, in homelessness clinics, in prisons, in management, in academia; GPs who are retainers, salaried, partners – everyone. 

We will make a web resource with these which we can take to policymakers, journalists, children and junior doctors thinking about careers, we will write this up as a discussion/research paper, and we will make a touchscreen installation with the results for use in RCGP central – so that everyone can quickly see what it is that real people value about what we do . 

+ important to acknowledge that GP has big problems, of course, lots of things that should be done better – agreed. BUT we also need to know what is good and useful – there is lots of research on problems – not enough on how to solve it – and hardly anything about what is valued.

We have details on how to submit here 

email or tweet me or Sam if you have questions 

Join in – we don’t think this will solve all the problems in general practice (natch) but we do think that this can contribute towards trying to make what we do better articulated and with a better chance of being preserved. 

margaret@margaretmccartney.com