Dr Mary McCarthy: Conference on improving general practice

Glasgow is an exciting city with many interesting spaces. One of these is the Scottish Event Campus, which is situated on the banks of the river Clyde and has a building called the Armadillo due to its resemblance to the small mammal.

It is a huge conference and was attended by medical students, newly-qualified doctors, those thinking of training for general practice and the doctors who are going to train them. There were GPs from overseas, academic GPs from universities and GPs from both inner-city practices and remote Hebridean islands.

The diverse group took part in a range of interesting sessions from testing for early signs of cancer, better treatments for lung disease, discussions on safeguarding, and revision demonstrations on cardio-pulmonary resuscitation. There was also the opportunity to hear from a number of key speakers about the main issues impacting general practice and wider healthcare.

The chair of the RCGP, Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard’s speech focused a lot on technological innovation in the NHS as she urged that investment was needed to effectively oversee plans to roll out new tech.

Given that we were in Scotland, the Scottish Minister for Sport and Health, Jeane Freeman, spoke of how she valued GPs and how they were the bedrock of the health system. Inevitably the issue of funding will come up given that general practice has suffered years of chronic underinvestment. With the increasing demand on services, GPs are finding that they are having to do more consultations in much less time.

One of the topics that was discussed was the practice of group consultations. The idea behind this is that groups of up to 15 patients, with the same problem, can all be seen together so that they can benefit from the same consultation and other patients’ experiences.

These gatherings are good opportunities to reiterate our commitments to improving general practice and put more pressure on the government to keep the promises they make.

* Dr Mary McCarthy is chair of the local medical committee and represents Shropshire, North Staffordshire and South Staffordshire on the General Practitioners Committee of the BMA. She has worked at Belvidere Surgery in Shrewsbury for more than 20 years.