My name is Kirran Bilkhu and I am undertaking a Fellowship in Wellbeing amongst Primary Care Staff in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire. I aim to research, plan, deliver and assess the impact of a 4 week Yoga Series on staff wellbeing. I have completed a pilot series for a small group of staff I work with and plan to roll out the programme in January 2023.

I am looking at barriers to accessing LARCs and promoting uptake by improving access and education. I will be looking at literature searches, patient questionnaires and semi structured interviews with health care professionals. I will also be looking to see why some ethnic minority groups don’t access LARC as much and try and develop patient information leaflets in foreign languages to help with this.

“Recruitment of Clinicians in deprived areas, what are the barriers, are there any solutions?” Primarily looking at newly qualified GPs to explore factors effecting recruitment and if there any solutions or strategies that could be implemented.

Dr Davidson works as a GP in Rushcliffe but is working with PCN 8 as their mid-career PCN fellow. Her project will be exploring the barriers to patients from an ethnic minority diagnosed with pre-diabetes attending the National Diabetes Prevention Programme. She will engage with this population by undertaking semi-structured interviews with the aim to identify any unmet needs. She will work in partnership with the PCN team to identify and deliver a plan to address these unmet needs.

“Forward Slash B” Project

My name is Dr James Read. I have been a GP in Beeston for nearly 20 years. My project is to improve the efficiency and safety of our blood test ordering across our PCN, using the GP SystemOne software tools available. For instance, rather than ordering a thyroid test one month and then a Non-Diabetic Hyperglycaemia test the next, a protocol will highlight to the person ordering the Thyroid test that other tests are also needed. This can help improve safety by highlighting where a patient is overdue important blood tests such as a U&E in Chronic Kidney Disease or by helping to screen for diabetes in high risk patients, and should free up Phlebotomy appointments and reduce waiting times. If there is sufficient time I will also start to plan a centralised recall system for our PCN, helping to improve productivity, free up practice staff time and work towards a more federated approach between practices.

As an experienced GP who has worked in the Arnold area for 20 years, I am passionate about improving care for our older patients. My project this year aims to open up discussion about frailty to improve the knowledge of clinicians, recording of frailty and to produce a useful resource for patients to help them get the best out of older age. I am also planning to sit a postgraduate examination in Geriatric Medicine in the hope that this will enable me to improve the care provided to patients.

Through the Phoenix programme, I have had the opportunity to look into discrepancies in availability and provision of Menopause care in my area of practice. This has given me a platform to organise my own PCN wide clinics thus hopefully highlighting the need for such services to be made available locally. I also endeavour to explore the variations in demand for menopause services and patient behaviours towards seeking help amongst different ethnic groups. I look forward to presenting my findings and discussing ongoing service provision with commissioners based on the data.

I have worked as a GP within Nottinghamshire for almost a decade now, but prior to becoming a doctor I was a physiotherapist and spent 5 years working within elderly rehabilitation helping people functionally restore their bodies after periods of ill health. For this reason I am passionate about ‘prevention being better than cure’, and this is even better when it doesn’t include the need to consult a doctor! I hope to use my fellowship year to set up a frailty prevention service aimed at slowing (or even reversing) the progression of problems commonly associated with an aging body and help keep people feeling fit, healthy and enjoying life well into their retirement and beyond.