Today, we’re going to back at the recent BJGP Research Conference, which was held just last week on the 20st of March 2025 in Bristol.

Transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions.

Speaker A

00:00:00.960 - 00:00:39.550

Hello and welcome to this BJGP podcast. I'm Nada Khan and I'm one of the Associate Editors of the Journal. Thanks for listening today.

In today's episode we're going to look back at the recent BJGP Research Conference which we held just last week on 20th March in Bristol. It was absolutely brilliant to welcome the BJGP team and people who attended to the Southwest.

And in today's episode I'm just going to talk about some the highlights and really focus on what the conference is about and maybe have a chat about how to get involved in the future. But first, here's a welcome to the conference from our Editor in Chief, Ewan Lawson.

Speaker B

00:00:40.270 - 00:01:16.520

My name's Ewan Lawson, I'm editor of the bjgp. So that means basically I'm the one person that the Journal would probably run without and everyone else does all the work.

But I do have to stand up here and say hello to you and I want to offer you the warmest of welcomes to the conference. Been running this for a few years and it's always really nice to get together and just try to help each other, you know, get involved.

It's not in a very scholarly way, you know, whether you're involved in research or whether you're interested in putting research into practice. We think we can offer you quite a lot more than just the fact that we publish research at BJGP and BJGP Open. So I hope you have a fantastic day.

Speaker A

00:01:17.320 - 00:03:26.850

So this was the seventh run of the BJGP Research Conference and this year we had a particular focus on a few different areas.

We took a bit of a deep dive into patient involvement, new and emerging research in general practice, general practice policy and how to get research into impact. And this year, as always, quite a bit around writing and also public speaking in academia.

The conference kicked off this year with an absolutely brilliant talk by Professor Martin Marshall, who some of you may know as the Chair of the Nuffield Trust. But he's also Emeritus professor of Healthcare Improvement at UCS and non Exec Director at the Royal Devon University Healthcare trust.

And until 2022, Martin was also the Chair of the Royal College of GPs and a GP in New East London. So definitely someone worth listening to about his experiences as well.

And Martin really focused in his talk on the relationship between general practice and policy and asked a really important question, which is how good are we as a profession at influencing decision decision makers?

And in his talk, Martin reflected on the fact that while the value of general practice is really well established for patients, communities and the wider nhs. It's often still misunderstood or undervalued at a policy level.

And in his talk he challenged whether that's purely down to policymakers or whether, as Julian Tudor Hart once put it, there's also an element of political literacy within the profession itself.

And what really followed was a thoughtful discussion about how both national leaders and individual clinicians can do more to shape policy, and whether that's through better communication, stronger advocacy, or even engaging more actively with the systems around us. It was a really thought provoking structure of the conference and linked closely to that broader theme of impact that ran throughout the day.

Here's just a short snippet of Martin speaking at the conference.

Speaker C

00:03:27.570 - 00:04:45.260

I wish I could have my career again and I'd be more influential than I was. I've learned a lot along the way, but this is what I've learned. First of all, as I've described, influencing is about far more than informy.

It's not about telling, it's about getting inside people's heads and understanding what's important to them. A lot of influencing is about timing. How do we decide when to influence? I think it's really important. Policy windows is an interesting concept.

So sometimes just a window opens that allows you to do something.

And a good example of this would be the evidence around Continuity of care, which is actually pretty strong in General practice was largely ignored by policymakers and politicians until the pandemic came along and they were looking for a way of delivering the vaccination program. And we made the case based on evidence that trust is really important to the success of uptake of vaccination programs.

And that's why government decided that general practice would deliver their program largely, rather than setting up a separate body to deliver it. So there's an example, another example of ways of change.

The NUFRE is doing some really important work around the distribution, the resource distribution formula for general practice, something which the Conservative governments of the past were not interested in, the Labour government is very interested in. So now is our time to push it while we can.

Speaker A

00:04:46.460 - 00:11:57.780

So it was a great start to the conference from Martin, which really focused down on how GPs and primary care researchers can get the most impact from their work to effect change. So in addition to the keynote sessions, we had a series of parallel sessions where people presented posters and talks about their work.

And what really struck me, listening to different talks and looking at the different posters that were on display, was just how strong the work was across the board, especially from medical students. And early career researchers.

There's clearly a lot of exciting work coming through and I wouldn't be surprised to see some of it published in the BJJP in the near future.

At the conference, we then had a series of workshops and these looked at patient and public involvement, writing for the BJGP and public speaking in academia. I attended Lucy Potter and the Bridging Gap team's excellent workshop on meaningful patient and public involvement in research.

Their team did an absolutely brilliant job at highlighting a familiar but important issue that those with the greatest health needs often face the biggest barriers to care and are probably the least likely to be involved meaningfully in research.

And what made this session stand out for me was that it was delivered alongside women with lived experience, which brought, I felt, a real deal, a real depth and authenticity to the discussion.

And the workshop was a absolutely powerful reminder of the importance of meaningful involvement and offered some really practical ideas for how we can better include marginalized patients in our work.

And going on to one of the regular features of the conference, which is the Right for Life workshop, led by our deputy editor at BJGP Life, Andrew Papaniktis and Tom Round. It's a really engaging session that encourages people to write and reflect on their experiences in general practice.

And I often describe JGP Life, the website, as sort of the coffee room of the journal. It's a space for more sort of reflective conversation and debate.

And here we're also always keen to receive some submissions from across the GP community, and it's probably worth pointing out that some of these pieces then go on to be published in the print journal too. And finally, the third workshop was led by Professor Graham Easton, who looked at public speaking for academics.

And I just want to touch on Graham's really interesting background that he was able to draw upon here. So, Graham was a senior producer for BBC Science Unit for many years and presented Case Notes, which is Radio 4's flagship medical program.

He's also a regular contributor to BBC Health Check and has quite a strong interest in the use of narratives and storytelling in medical education, which is a topic he looked at in depth in his doctoral work.

So, looking back to his workshop, it focused on something we've all experienced, which is sitting through a talk or presentation where the key message gets lost in really dense slides and you just lose the audience.

And Graham's session was all about how to communicate our work more clearly and make it engaging, using things like storytelling, simplifying your core message and using visuals that actually support you're saying, rather than Overwhelming it. It was a really practical session with lots of tips to take away and use straight away.

And I think that everyone who attended, who attended learned something new about how to present their research in an engaging and meaningful way. So that's a roundup of the workshops. And finally we had the last keynote speaker of the conference, Dr. Rebecca Payne.

And Rebecca really brought together one of the central themes of the conference, which was impact going back to Martin Marshall's talk as well. And Rebecca's talk focused on what happens after publication and challenged the idea that getting a paper accepted as the endpoint.

Instead, she kind of framed it as the beginning. So that's the point at which the real work of influencing practice and policy starts.

Rebecca's got a lot of experience in research, but for this talk she drew specifically on examples from The Remote by Default 2 study, which explored how the shift towards remote consulting and general practice has played out in reality. And this includes some of the benefits, but also some of the unintended consequences for access, continuity and patient experience.

It was a really helpful example of how complex system changes can't be understood through simple metrics alone and how research, like the Remote to Default study, can help unpack those nuances.

I guess what Rebecca's trying to point out is that if we want research to make a difference, we need to think more deliberately, like much more deliberately, about how it's communicated, who it reaches, and how it feeds into decision making. And that could include things like engaging with policymakers, working with the media, or translating findings into more accessible formats.

And just going back to Martin Marshall's talk, he talked about how at the Nuffield Trust, they have a pretty strong allocation in their budgets towards dissemination. And I think that's a pointer to take away for researchers.

So when you're developing budgets or research programs, think really carefully at the outset about putting aside that funding and that money to get sort of your message across more widely.

So going back to Rebecca's talk, it felt like a really fitting way to close conference and a strong reminder that the value of research really lies in whether it leads to meaningful change in practice. So, yeah, just I just wanted to come back finally to that point.

About one of the things that we consistently hear about the BJGP research conference is how welcoming and approachable it is. It's a really easy space to strike up conversations with people at all stages of their careers.

So from students to early career researchers through to more senior academics and members of the BJJP editorial team who always attend.

And I think it's always just been a really great opportunity to have those informal conversations that sometimes often spark new ideas or collaborations.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're interested in meeting like minded colleagues in general practice or primary care research or thinking about getting involved in research and publishing, it's definitely one to consider for next year. So a really big thank you to everyone who came along this year.

I hope you all found it as engaging and inspiring as I did and it was lovely to meet so many of you throughout the day as well.

And with that, that's the end of this season of the BJGP podcast, so we'll be taking a short break over Easter, but we'll be back soon with a new series where as always, we'll be discussing the latest research published in the BJGP and what it means for practice. We're planning to come back in early May, so do keep an eye out for that. But as always, thank you again for listening.

Hello and welcome to this BJGP podcast.

I'm Nada Khan and I'm one of the Associate Editors of the Journal.

Thanks for listening today.

In today's episode we're going to look back at the recent BJGP Research Conference which we held just last week on 20th March in Bristol.

It was absolutely brilliant to welcome the BJGP team and people who attended to the Southwest.

And in today's episode I'm just going to talk about some the highlights and really focus on what the conference is about and maybe have a chat about how to get involved in the future.

But first, here's a welcome to the conference from our Editor in Chief, Ewan Lawson.

My name's Ewan Lawson, I'm editor of the bjgp.

So that means basically I'm the one person that the Journal would probably run without and everyone else does all the work.

But I do have to stand up here and say hello to you and I want to offer you the warmest of welcomes to the conference.

Been running this for a few years and it's always really nice to get together and just try to help each other, you know, get involved.

It's not in a very scholarly way, you know, whether you're involved in research or whether you're interested in putting research into practice.

We think we can offer you quite a lot more than just the fact that we publish research at BJGP and BJGP Open.

So I hope you have a fantastic day.

So this was the seventh run of the BJGP Research Conference and this year we had a particular focus on a few different areas.

We took a bit of a deep dive into patient involvement, new and emerging research in general practice, general practice policy and how to get research into impact.

And this year, as always, quite a bit around writing and also public speaking in academia.

The conference kicked off this year with an absolutely brilliant talk by Professor Martin Marshall, who some of you may know as the Chair of the Nuffield Trust.

But he's also Emeritus professor of Healthcare Improvement at UCS and non Exec Director at the Royal Devon University Healthcare trust.

So definitely someone worth listening to about his experiences as well.

And Martin really focused in his talk on the relationship between general practice and policy and asked a really important question, which is how good are we as a profession at influencing decision decision makers?

And in his talk, Martin reflected on the fact that while the value of general practice is really well established for patients, communities and the wider nhs.

It's often still misunderstood or undervalued at a policy level.

And in his talk he challenged whether that's purely down to policymakers or whether, as Julian Tudor Hart once put it, there's also an element of political literacy within the profession itself.

And what really followed was a thoughtful discussion about how both national leaders and individual clinicians can do more to shape policy, and whether that's through better communication, stronger advocacy, or even engaging more actively with the systems around us.

It was a really thought provoking structure of the conference and linked closely to that broader theme of impact that ran throughout the day.

Here's just a short snippet of Martin speaking at the conference.

I wish I could have my career again and I'd be more influential than I was.

I've learned a lot along the way, but this is what I've learned.

First of all, as I've described, influencing is about far more than informy.

It's not about telling, it's about getting inside people's heads and understanding what's important to them.

A lot of influencing is about timing.

How do we decide when to influence?

I think it's really important.

Policy windows is an interesting concept.

So sometimes just a window opens that allows you to do something.

And a good example of this would be the evidence around Continuity of care, which is actually pretty strong in General practice was largely ignored by policymakers and politicians until the pandemic came along and they were looking for a way of delivering the vaccination program.

And we made the case based on evidence that trust is really important to the success of uptake of vaccination programs.

And that's why government decided that general practice would deliver their program largely, rather than setting up a separate body to deliver it.

So there's an example, another example of ways of change.

The NUFRE is doing some really important work around the distribution, the resource distribution formula for general practice, something which the Conservative governments of the past were not interested in, the Labour government is very interested in.

So now is our time to push it while we can.

So it was a great start to the conference from Martin, which really focused down on how GPs and primary care researchers can get the most impact from their work to effect change.

So in addition to the keynote sessions, we had a series of parallel sessions where people presented posters and talks about their work.

And what really struck me, listening to different talks and looking at the different posters that were on display, was just how strong the work was across the board, especially from medical students.

And early career researchers.

There's clearly a lot of exciting work coming through and I wouldn't be surprised to see some of it published in the BJJP in the near future.

At the conference, we then had a series of workshops and these looked at patient and public involvement, writing for the BJGP and public speaking in academia.

I attended Lucy Potter and the Bridging Gap team's excellent workshop on meaningful patient and public involvement in research.

Their team did an absolutely brilliant job at highlighting a familiar but important issue that those with the greatest health needs often face the biggest barriers to care and are probably the least likely to be involved meaningfully in research.

And what made this session stand out for me was that it was delivered alongside women with lived experience, which brought, I felt, a real deal, a real depth and authenticity to the discussion.

And the workshop was a absolutely powerful reminder of the importance of meaningful involvement and offered some really practical ideas for how we can better include marginalized patients in our work.

And going on to one of the regular features of the conference, which is the Right for Life workshop, led by our deputy editor at BJGP Life, Andrew Papaniktis and Tom Round.

It's a really engaging session that encourages people to write and reflect on their experiences in general practice.

And I often describe JGP Life, the website, as sort of the coffee room of the journal.

It's a space for more sort of reflective conversation and debate.

And here we're also always keen to receive some submissions from across the GP community, and it's probably worth pointing out that some of these pieces then go on to be published in the print journal too.

And finally, the third workshop was led by Professor Graham Easton, who looked at public speaking for academics.

And I just want to touch on Graham's really interesting background that he was able to draw upon here.

So, Graham was a senior producer for BBC Science Unit for many years and presented Case Notes, which is Radio 4's flagship medical program.

He's also a regular contributor to BBC Health Check and has quite a strong interest in the use of narratives and storytelling in medical education, which is a topic he looked at in depth in his doctoral work.

So, looking back to his workshop, it focused on something we've all experienced, which is sitting through a talk or presentation where the key message gets lost in really dense slides and you just lose the audience.

And Graham's session was all about how to communicate our work more clearly and make it engaging, using things like storytelling, simplifying your core message and using visuals that actually support you're saying, rather than Overwhelming it.

It was a really practical session with lots of tips to take away and use straight away.

And I think that everyone who attended, who attended learned something new about how to present their research in an engaging and meaningful way.

So that's a roundup of the workshops.

And finally we had the last keynote speaker of the conference, Dr. Rebecca Payne.

And Rebecca really brought together one of the central themes of the conference, which was impact going back to Martin Marshall's talk as well.

And Rebecca's talk focused on what happens after publication and challenged the idea that getting a paper accepted as the endpoint.

Instead, she kind of framed it as the beginning.

So that's the point at which the real work of influencing practice and policy starts.

Rebecca's got a lot of experience in research, but for this talk she drew specifically on examples from The Remote by Default 2 study, which explored how the shift towards remote consulting and general practice has played out in reality.

And this includes some of the benefits, but also some of the unintended consequences for access, continuity and patient experience.

It was a really helpful example of how complex system changes can't be understood through simple metrics alone and how research, like the Remote to Default study, can help unpack those nuances.

I guess what Rebecca's trying to point out is that if we want research to make a difference, we need to think more deliberately, like much more deliberately, about how it's communicated, who it reaches, and how it feeds into decision making.

And that could include things like engaging with policymakers, working with the media, or translating findings into more accessible formats.

And just going back to Martin Marshall's talk, he talked about how at the Nuffield Trust, they have a pretty strong allocation in their budgets towards dissemination.

And I think that's a pointer to take away for researchers.

So when you're developing budgets or research programs, think really carefully at the outset about putting aside that funding and that money to get sort of your message across more widely.

So going back to Rebecca's talk, it felt like a really fitting way to close conference and a strong reminder that the value of research really lies in whether it leads to meaningful change in practice.

So, yeah, just I just wanted to come back finally to that point.

About one of the things that we consistently hear about the BJGP research conference is how welcoming and approachable it is.

It's a really easy space to strike up conversations with people at all stages of their careers.

So from students to early career researchers through to more senior academics and members of the BJJP editorial team who always attend.

And I think it's always just been a really great opportunity to have those informal conversations that sometimes often spark new ideas or collaborations.

So I guess what I'm trying to say is if you're interested in meeting like minded colleagues in general practice or primary care research or thinking about getting involved in research and publishing, it's definitely one to consider for next year.

So a really big thank you to everyone who came along this year.

I hope you all found it as engaging and inspiring as I did and it was lovely to meet so many of you throughout the day as well.

And with that, that's the end of this season of the BJGP podcast, so we'll be taking a short break over Easter, but we'll be back soon with a new series where as always, we'll be discussing the latest research published in the BJGP and what it means for practice.

We're planning to come back in early May, so do keep an eye out for that.

But as always, thank you again for listening.