Leading towards Health for All
Creating Synergies between Public Health and Primary Care
Keywords: medical education
Introduction:
Purpose: Peer support medical education and pastoral support
Why: To help registrars to pass RCA and AKT. To share reliable resources. To support each other through the pandemic and build a network of professionals nationally. To liaise with specialists and involve them in GP teaching.
Method:
We use the Facebook, Telegram and Whatsapp platforms to discuss cases and answer queries about the exams, share resources, and offer peer support with qualified GPs and specialists. Since Feb 2021, we have had over 1500 doctors across 3 social media platforms. We've had 30,000 messages on one WhatsApp group alone. We get between 20-100 messages a day forming a team to deal with these queries to add to the peer support. Smaller study groups are created from the main group.
Results:
Since Feb 2021, thousands of trainees around the UK have passed the MRCGP exams using our teaching and support. The peer support network takes the onus away from a single medical educator and collates a vast amount of information from multiple medical educators/trainers; thereby creating a digital library of information for all trainees - exam related or otherwise. This free service makes it very attractive; and they remain anonymous to each other, thereby creating an honest platform for open discussion. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive from all trainees and word of mouth has spread rapidly, growing the groups exponentially. Trainees add colleagues to the groups and often stay after they pass their exams to 'give back' to their fellow trainees.
Conclusions:
Good education doesn't need to be expensive! Creating a network of thousands of doctors is far more effective than learning from a few experts. This methodology of creating a network can be applied to medical education in any domain and can be applied to a wide range of other areas of primary care
#5
EQuiP is open to both Individual and Organizational Memberships. EQuiP offers a platform to improve the knowledge base and to improve closer collaboration between GPs / Family Doctors, researchers, educators, policy makers and organisations involved in quality and safety in family medicine and primary care.
