Reports

Report of the General Board on the establishment of a Professorship of General Practice

The General Board beg leave to report to the University as follows:

1. The School of Clinical Medicine pursues its mission of medical education and research in close collaboration with its NHS partners, and identifies research themes which will link key areas of biomedical science with relevant clinical problems of importance to the health service.

2. General Practice as a clinical discipline is at the centre of healthcare delivery. General Practitioners are responsible for medicine in the community and, increasingly, play a significant role in the commissioning of secondary and tertiary care, i.e. hospital-based medicine. As an academic discipline, General Practice is concerned with research in areas as diverse as behavioural research (e.g. in relation to exercise, nutrition, and smoking), health services research (e.g. in relation to the effectiveness of particular configurations of services for healthcare delivery), and translational medicine (e.g. designing community based health interventions). General Practice is also a core part of the undergraduate medical curriculum, with a significant proportion of medical graduates destined for careers in General Practice.

3. The School of Clinical Medicine has considerable strengths in General Practice through its General Practice Unit in the Department of Public Health and Primary Care and its Institute of Public Health. Although strong, the Unit is small by national standards, and indeed has failed to reach the critical mass required for membership of the National School for Primary Care. The School of Clinical Medicine has taken steps to expand the Unit in order to address this weakness, having appointed three new Professors and one Director of Research since the 2008 RAE. However, the retirement in 2011 of Professor Ann Louise Kinmonth from her Professorship of General Practice has reduced the strength of the Unit, and the NHS funds which supported her appointment lapsed at the end of her tenure.

4. The Faculty Board of Clinical Medicine consider that it is important to re-establish a further single tenure Professorship of General Practice to allow a replacement for Professor Kinmonth to be appointed in advance of the submission deadline for the REF. Non-recurrent funds have been made available to support this appointment for the first two years, and the School has agreed to meet the full costs thereafter.

5. The General Board have accepted the case made by the Faculty Board; they have agreed to propose the establishment of the Professorship from 1 June 2012. The Board are assured that the proposed Professorship will attract a strong field of well-qualified candidates; they have agreed to concur in the view of the Faculty Board that an election to the Professorship should be made by an ad hoc Board of Electors and that candidature should be open without limitation or preference to all persons whose work falls within the general field of the title of the Professorship. The Faculty Board will provide support and facilities for the work of the Professor from within existing resources.

6. The General Board recommend:

That a Professorship of General Practice be established in the University, for a single tenure from 1 June 2012, placed in Schedule B of the Statutes, and assigned to the Department of Public Health and Primary Care.

7 March 2012	L. K. Borysiewicz, Vice-Chancellor	Christopher Crow	Robert Kennicutt
	N. Bampos	Simon Franklin	Rachael Padman
	William Brown	Andrew Gamble	J. Rallison
	H. A. Chase	C. A. Gilligan	Patrick Sissons
	Sarah Coakley	David Good	Morgan Wild