#BJGPLife on tour – find us in the crowd at RCGP Annual Conference 2023!

Andrew Papanikitas is deputy editor of the BJGP, and a GP in Oxford. He is on X: @gentlemedic

In the last few weeks it feels like BJGP life has been on tour in London, Leicester, and now Glasgow.

At the RSM’s GP and primary care update in London, BJGP’s Editor Euan Lawson shared his ‘personal top ten’ papers in BJGP. That is to say, the 10 papers published in the journal that he felt the audience should read first – The management of ear wax was a favourite. I was there to remind delegates to think about medical ethics. The Royal Society of Medicine GP update (did I mention it’s the forty-second?!) also sported a poster competition and a primary care teamwork prize in association with CAIPE. There was much that might be shared more widely with a Life readership. This included a co-produced short film drama about the impact of COVID-19 on young people’s mental health. I was also thrilled at the General Practice and Primary Healthcare Section dinner to hear celebrated television journalist John Humphries state that (if he were prime minister) he would ‘Make [ultra-processed food] illegal.’ He was responding to a question about his book, ‘The great food gamble,’ one of the first bestsellers on the harms of industrial food production in the UK and its attendant health harms. Jamie Oliver, Tim Spector, Henry Dimbleby, and Chris Van Tulleken have all taken a crack at this leviathan since.

The following week in Leicester I met with Professor Jeremy Howick and the inspirational members of the Stoneygate centre for empathic healthcare. I was there on a funded visiting scholarship, in part to discuss empathy, ethics and self-reflection. At a previous RCGP conference I had been asked to write a piece for InnovAIT combining ethics and professionalism. For me this boiled down to four questions: What are my goals, my beliefs, my values, and the conditions in which I work/live? We discussed how reflecting on each-other’s goals, beliefs, values, and condition might enhance good practice. The centre is embedded both spiritually and geographically within the medical school. It aims at introducing and sustaining empathy in the medical school curriculum. This has overt expression in early presentation of patient health experiences and communication skills training but also as theme threaded throughout Leicester Medical School’s curriculum. Jeremy Howick, Kamlesh Khunti and colleagues recently discussed empathy as the key to embracing diversity in BJGP Life. A note of caution about sending us patient narratives and case histories: these usually require patient consent  (we have a consent form) or patient co-authorship.

And now many of us are in Glasgow for the 2023 RCGP annual primary care meeting. The BJGP team will be among the throng. If you are there, find us! Many of our editorial team and wider board will be presenting their own work, no doubt, but we’ll also be on the lookout for papers for BJGP and great content for BJGP Life & The Life and Times section. We don’t have a stand in the concourse, or an insert in the delegate pack but you can pitch work to us via BJGP and via BJGP life or BJGP Open and we will be active on social media with @BJGPJournal / @BJGPOpen and #BJGPLife (X/former twitter). And who knows – if you’ve given a great presentation or have an amazing poster, we might well be looking for you.

Featured Photo by Roland Lösslein on Unsplash