APEx: Barbara Starfield Lecture 2016: The Future of Primary Care

Professor Barbara Starfield was a world-renowned American researcher who did more than any other academic in the last 50 years to demonstrate the importance of primary care in providing effective and cost effective health services.

Primary care has always been a core part of the NHS – often described as the jewel in the crown of the NHS. Indeed, many other countries look to the NHS as a model for primary care. Starfield herself identified British general practice as one of the world’s most successful models.

Yet primary care in the UK is under unprecedented strain. It’s increasingly hard to recruit doctors and nurses to work in general practice and many are retiring early. Care moves inexorably out of hospitals without any transfer of resources and the BMA describes general practice as being at ‘breaking point’.

Professor Roland trained in Medicine at the University of Oxford. Following vocational training, he worked in London and Cambridge before moving to the Chair in General Practice in the University of Manchester in 1992. He moved to the inaugural Chair of Health Services Research in the University of Cambridge in 2009. Professor Roland was a practising GP from 1979 to 2014.

In 2015 Professor Martin Roland chaired a government commission to identify models of primary care that would meet the future needs of the NHS. In this lecture he will describe how British general practice could once again become the envy of the world.

The Exeter Collaboration for Academic Primary Care (APEx) has set up the Barbara Starfield Annual Lecture to promote the dissemination for research relevant to the organisation, delivery and practice of Primary Care.

More information about Professor Barbara Starfield Memorial Lectures