The Kieran Sweeney Prize 2025 is a national UK prize for medical writing by GPs. It is awarded by The Tamar Faculty of the Royal College of General Practitioners.
This year’s title is: “The GP model for delivery of Primary Care is outdated for the society in 2025”
Rules and Entry Criteria
The Prize
Professor Kieran Sweeney was a GP in Exeter who died in 2009 of mesothelioma, at the age of 58. He applied ideas from philosophy, the arts, mathematics, business and social sciences to the care of his patients and the process of healthcare. He was an accomplished medical writer. The Tamar Faculty of the RCGP is to honour his memory again with a national prize of £1,000 for the best original piece submitted by a practicing GP in answer to the question posed above.
The Article
Ideas from disciplines outside medicine such as the arts, business, philosophy, literature, or political and social science will be especially welcome.
The article must be previously unpublished and have been written solely by the entrant. Ideas from disciplines outside medicine such as the arts, business, philosophy, literature, or political and social science will be especially welcome.The piece should be written in prose at a level that an interested member of the public will understand, under the title “What does the future hold for the relationship between a patient and their GP in the UK?”
Judging Criteria
- Command and good use of the literature relevant to the topic.
- Fresh insights; cogent challenge to received wisdom.
- Writing that is clear, direct and concise.
- Writing that is elegant, compelling and uses language in original ways.
- Writing that avoids jargon or cliché.
- Correct grammar, syntax, spelling, punctuation and referencing.
The Judges
Nada Khan, Associate Editor BJGP
Judit Konya, Academic GP Registrar
Nick Bradley, former Provost RCGP Tamar Faculty
The Rules
- The competition is open to licensed general medical practitioners appearing on the General Medical Council GP register. To avoid conflicts of interest, entry is closed to officers and members of the Board of the Tamar Faculty RCGP; to the judges of the prize and to their immediate families; and to members of Kieran Sweeney’s immediate family.
- Joint entrants or joint authors may not enter.
- The article must not have been entered for a national RCGP or RCGP Faculty award or prize in the three years up to Monday 28 April 2025.
- If in the judges’ opinion none of the entries merits being awarded the prize, no prize will be awarded.
- The maximum length of an article entered for the prize is 1,500 words, excluding the title, frontispiece, references and acknowledgements, up to 10 references. The word count must be stated.
- The article must be text only, with no diagrams, tables, figures or photographs.
- The article must be presented in Word (UK English) using Tahoma font size 11, and 1.5 line spacing, with references in Vancouver style.
- The entry should not include any patient accounts without explicit written consent.*
- The competition opens on Friday 14 March 2025. The deadline for entries is 09:00 on Monday 28 April 2025.
- The judges’ decision will be final. Entrants will be notified of the result, after which no further correspondence will be conducted relating to the judging process.
How to enter
Articles must be submitted by email, along with a completed entry form which is available from Alice Sefton, Tamar Faculty Administrator tamar@rcgp.org.uk
Tel. 020 3188 7712
*Please see an example consent form here https://bjgp.org/sites/default/files/PDFs/bjgp_consentform.pdf
Featured image by Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash
