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Londonwide LMCs Annual Conference leads debate on general practice workforce

On 20 April Londonwide LMCs took over the Emirates Stadium in Holloway for our annual conference “We Can Work it Out, Powering up London’s Primary Care Workforce”, where we launched the current “GP State of Emergency” campaign. The event was a massive success and we would like to thank everyone who contributed, attended, and covered for colleagues so that they could come for their support.

You can see Dr Michelle Drage speaking about the success of the Conference here. A further selection of talks from the day are available on our Vimeo channel:

• Dr Michelle Drage, Chief Executive of Londonwide LMCs - Meeting the London Challenge
• Dr Crystal Oldman, Chief Executive of The Queen's Nursing Institute - Practice nursing workforce challenges in London
• Lord Victor Adebowale, Chief Executive of Turning Point - Wider determinants of health
• Professor Graham Watt, University of Glasgow - Silver bullets in general practice and primary care

Media coverage

Both the conference and the campaign launch were covered by national and trade press:

• The Guardian covered Michelle’s GP State of Emergency announcement in the context of the Mayoral election.
• GPOnline covered Michelle’s #GPStateofEmergency speech and focused on her concerns over funding. They also covered Graham Watt’s Silver Bullets talk, Crystal Oldman’s London Practice Nurse Workforce Report and Clare Gerada’s comments on workload.
• The Nursing Times wrote about Crystal Oldman’s report and picked up on Conference’s concerns over nursing bursaries.
• The BMJ covered the closing panel discussion with Johann Malawana.

Annual conference and #GPStateofEmergency media coverage

One of the goals of the GPStateofEmergency campaign is to raise awareness of what GPs and practice staff have to say, using social media as well as traditional. This takes a lead from the way junior doctors were able to unite their profession during the contract dispute by directly communicating their concerns and experiences with the public.

Our tweets on the day of the conference appeared over 36,000 times in the newsfeeds of twitter users, spreading the #GPStateofEmergency message far and wide.

And following the Londonwide LMCs conference we began securing support for a social media “Thunderclap”, which encourages multiple users to sign up in support of a campaign and agree to send a simultaneous message out on Twitter, Facebook and other channels. Our message was scheduled for after the London Mayoral election, to encourage the new Mayor to support general practice. Over 200 people signed up their messages were seen by over 103,000 social media users.

Highlighting related issues, Michelle has recently had two pieces published in the Huffington Post: the first looks at London’s health challenges and was published on 6 May as Sadiq Khan was elected Mayor of London; the second was published on 18 May, the day of the Queen’s Speech, and looks back on the Government’s first year in power.

Last updated : 25 May 2016

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