In 2011, a Cambridge medical student and a foundation programme doctor working in the West Midlands founded the first ever Twitter journal club (@twitjournalclub/#twitjc). Within weeks they had close to a thousand followers. There are now 59 journal club Twitter hashtags, although not all of these are active, including @twitjournalclub which became inactive in December 2013.
@GPJournalClub (#gpjc) was founded in December 2015 by Lucy Pocock (@drpoco), who was at the time a GP registrar on maternity leave. The account had 100 followers within 24 hours and now has over a thousand. The first tweet chat took place on 10th January 2016 and had 25 participants. Monthly tweet chats then followed, supported by the BJGP Blog, until March 2017. Juggling being a new GP, and relatively new mum, Lucy found that she had little time to devote to running the journal club and it became increasingly difficult to recruit willing volunteers to co-chair the tweet chats.
On Sunday 9th September 2018 at 7.30pm, @GPJournalClub will relaunch with Dr Shibley Rahman (@dr_shibley) in the hot seat, selecting a paper and co-chairing the discussion.
In order to create a more sustainable future for @GPJournalClub Lucy, now a School for Primary Care Research GP Career Progression Fellow, is looking for volunteers to be part of a management group. This is a role that would particularly suit academic GP trainees and would look great on a CV!
If you are interested, please contact her on Twitter (@drpoco) or via email (lucy.pocock@bristol.ac.uk).
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