I hope you and your teams are keeping well.

Thanks for agreeing to host students in the midst of much uncertainty and the challenges you are facing. We are grateful for the many formal and informal discussions we have had with a number of you over the last 2 months; these have been most helpful. With your partnership we will continue to do our best to train doctors who are capable and ready to join us to meet the needs of our patients in the years to come. You will understand that it is not possible to train doctors fully by only using remote video-conferencing facilities. Therefore we seek ways to give our students the best possible clinical experience within the constraints that Covid-19 is placing us under.

As we move rapidly then towards the new academic year we wanted to briefly bring you up to speed with how planning is proceeding for clinical attachments in General Practice. More information will follow in due course and will be shared on this website

1.       Dates for your diary

Please set time aside to join our GP Tutor Meetings (Via Zoom):

a.       Annual GP Tutor Meeting (2^nd September 2020 2-3.45pm)

b.       Year 1 & 2 Family Medicine Tutor Meeting (9^th September 2020 2-3.45pm) – only for those practices hosting Family Medicine

2.       Notifications for GP Clinical Placement Allocations

The clinical placement allocations have been delayed for reasons, too many to mention, but all of which you would understand. We are planning to allocate for the first half the year in the first instance and to have these allocations with you for the start of September (sooner if possible). One complicating factor has been the principle of minimising the amount of student movement around different clinical facilities and this will have a direct impact on how we place students in GP. The principle being pursued is to have students in one Trust area for the entire year. Your patience is very much appreciated.

3.       Covid-19 GP Placements Stages Framework

We have been working on a framework with 5 stages (according to the prevalent Covid-19 circumstances) that describes the types of learning activities and clinical encounters that we hope you will be able to provide for our students. Stage 5 represents normal attachments, Stage 1, suspension of clinical placements and stage 2-4, gradations of clinical experiences between 1 and 5. We hope this will provide a language we can use for our discussions with you as tutors and a mechanism by which we can dial up or down on the types of attachments in accordance with circumstances at the time.

4.       Zoom / AccuRx

We are anticipating that you may wish to set up Video-Consultations for students when on clinical attachments. Those with EMIS have access to AccuRx. For those Practices using Vision the HSCB offer a Zoom licence. In anticipation of these needs may we ask you to ask the HSCB to be set up with a Zoom licence. We will provide instruction and support in due course for the use of these platforms to support our students on their clinical attachments. If you need webcams +/-speaker sets would you please email us on gpadmin@qub.ac.uk

If you have any other queries or questions please do not hesitate to contact us on gpadmin@qub.ac.uk