Editorial
MRC Research Fellow and General Practitioner University of Southampton, Southampton, UK
Email: caes{at}soton.ac.uk
Welcome to the first issue of InnovAiT.
So, who am I? I am the executive editor of InnovAiT and, in this role, I am largely responsible for the content of this journal. I have been a GP since 1995. I went into medicine wanting to become a GP, did my GP training on the Southampton vocational training scheme and then took up a Partnership in the New Forest. I moved into academic general practice when my children were young, working as a research fellow at Southampton University Medical School and holding an NHS research training fellowship followed by an MRC health service research fellowship. I have an MSc in research in health and have gained a PhD with a thesis on the topic of support in the community following stroke.
During my time as an academic GP I started writing and became the lead author and editor of the first edition of the Oxford Handbook of General Practice. It is the best-selling GP textbook in the UK, we are now on the third edition and we have won several major book prizes along the way. My writing career has expanded as a result and I currently also edit the Oxford GP Library series and am co-author of the Handbook of Practice Management. Recently I moved back into clinical general practice, although I still pursue some research interests, at present concerning ownership of genetic information. My children are now aged between 10 and 14, I still live in the New Forest, and we spend our free time sailing on the Solent, watching the children play sport and dog walking in the Forest.
As you already know, the system of GP training in the UK has undergone a radical overhaul. For the first time there is a comprehensive GP curriculum that every GP in training must follow to pass the new MRCGP and graduate into general practice. This journal was created with the remit of assisting you to follow that curriculum and to complement the GP training that you will receive through your local GP training scheme and trainer. So this is your journal and we want it to meet your needs. We also want you to become actively involved with InnovAiT.
To produce the first few issues, we conducted market research with GPs in training to find out what they wanted. The structure of this journal is the result of that research. We will aim to cover topics from two clinical areas, and one non-clinical area from the GP curriculum in each issue. We will rotate through the whole curriculum on a three year cycle. In addition we will have a news section highlighting important new policies, research and guidelines affecting GPs; an article ‘from the trainer’; and an exams tips section. It was apparent from our research that self-test questions would be helpful, so we have included some ‘applied knowledge test’ questions in the journal and will reproduce these and include many more similar questions to enable you to test your knowledge in the online version of the journal at www.rcgp-innovait.oxfordjournals.org
The online journal will initially give you access to indexed articles from back issues and provide access to the applied knowledge test questions. We aim to develop the online journal further in future.
So what do we want you to do? Feedback from you is extremely valuable for us so that we can mould and adjust the journal to meet your needs better. Please feel free to contact us if you have any comments to make – good or bad. Try to be constructive when making comments, for example if you don’t like something, tell us how you think it could be done better. It may be possible to include good ideas for new items in the online version of InnovAiT even if we do not have room in the printed journal. I will endeavour to respond to each comment that we receive.
If you would like to be more actively involved, we would welcome applications from any Associates in Training (AiT), GPs or GP trainers who would like to write articles for us. As each issue is topic-based, please contact us before writing an article and we will tell you when that topic is likely to arise, send you instructions about length and format, and tell you when the deadline for articles will be. For those of you who do not feel confident enough to write, we would also welcome applications from anyone who would like to review articles or self-test questions for us prior to publication. If you are applying to review, please tell us which topics you are interested in.
Finally, we have deliberately planned a page or two in the journal for your own contributions. For example, we could print travel reports, interesting significant events, reports of practice audits that you have been involved with, descriptions of interesting jobs that GPs might do, ‘It shouldn’t happen to a GP’ stories ...... really anything that you think would be of interest to other AiTs.
As a GP, I have never stopped learning new things. My patients continuously throw up problems that I have not encountered before, or show me old problems from a completely new angle – and that is one of the joys of being a GP. It is not possible to cover everything that you might encounter in your journey to becoming a GP in a journal, but together with InnovAiT’s editorial board I hope that we can help you in a constructive and enjoyable way to progress towards that goal.
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