NHS: Association of Medical Research Charities Report

Lord Rea Excerpts

Thursday 27th June 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Rea]

My Lords, I apologise for missing the deadline yesterday and hence being squeezed into the gap. I wanted to say a few words about the position of general practice in the health service. As my noble friend pointed out, the AMRC report finds that fewer GPs than hospital doctors are interested or involved in research, most of them citing time as the reason. Setting aside dedicated time for research is not easy in the average primary care setting. It is also possible that fewer GPs are research-minded and that, except for academic general practice, publishing peer-reviewed research papers is less important in their career advancement.

However, research in general practice is alive and well. Every medical school now has an academic department of primary care linked to the Royal College of GPs, supporting research in primary care through the RCGP innovation and research centre. The director of the centre suggested to me that the academic status of general practice would be enhanced if more research-minded and bright medical students or doctors could be recruited into general practice. One way in which to do this would be for the NIHR to proactively offer to fund PhD or MSc fellowships in general practice. This would be attractive to research-minded medical students or practitioners contemplating a career in general practice but uncertain about its research possibilities. Does the noble Earl have any influence over the funding decisions of NIHR? I suggest that this might be promising territory.

My experience, in answer to various noble Lords who have mentioned patients in research, is that patients are nearly always willing to take part in research projects if it is recommended to them by a doctor, hospital or care unit that they trust and its purpose is fully explained to them.