Tayside Centre for General Practice (within the Division of Community Health Sciences (CHS))

Subject Profile

The aims of Tayside Centre for General Practice (TCGP) are:

promoting multidisciplinary research at an international standard of quality which is relevant to the local population as well as contributing to the theoretical understanding of primary care;
contributing to the education of undergraduates in Dundee Medical School and GP Registrars in Tayside in a research-rich environment;
developing high standards in undergraduate and postgraduate teaching;
facilitating clinical governance in primary care;
supporting service development in Tayside by providing training for members of the primary healthcare team;
evaluating health and social care service innovation.

There has been a recemt expansion in CHS research facilities following the building of the Health Informatics Centre (HIC) housing the R&D part of the department along with the Dental Health Services Research Unit (DHSRU), and research facilities for informatics and Epidemiology and Public Health.

2001 RAE Grading: 4 (Community Based Clinical Subjects)

We believe educational research is an important way of keeping our teaching at the cutting edge and staff motivated and enthused.

Recent work includes:

evaluation of consultation skills teaching;
comparison of postgraduate assessment instruments;
evaluation of innovation in GP training.

Current work includes:

analysis of reflective practice in the undergraduate curriculum;
analysis of the educational role of electives;
application of the consultation and relational empathy scale in general practice (undergraduate and postgraduate)
use of multi source feedback in undergraduate and postgraduate training;
development and testing of a feedback model for use with third party feedback.

Main Community Health Sciences Research Interests

Health Informatics

Health Informatics remains the principal research theme in community health sciences, building on the HIC's expertise in record-linkage of patient-level data derived from clinical and other datasets. This additionally supports considerable research in the Understanding and Management of Long Term Conditions theme, elsewhere in the University and with colleagues from other HEIs, the NHS and industry. Sullivan and Wyatt have defined the current status of Health Informatics in a series of 12 articles for the BMJ.

Contact: Professor Jeremy Wyatt

Understanding and Management of Long Term Conditions

The research in this group spans the spectrum from basic social research, through clinical research, to applied research aimed at increasing service uptake. Infrastructure development includes the Scottish Clinical Interaction Project (SCIP - Scottish Funding Council Research Development Grant), which has developed a research platform for digital recording and storage of consultations for large cohorts of primary care patients, with linkage to HIC's existing clinical datasets. This represents a radical extension to the concept of linked 'routine' data, with considerable potential for examining the consultation interactions that underlie the experience, quality and safety of healthcare.

Contact: Professor Iain Crombie