Imperial College London Primary Care

Senior GP Teaching Fellow Dr Graham Easton from the Department of Public Health and Primary Care recently visited Ghana on behalf of the BBC World Service to host a radio debate on whether failed health systems in Africa make global epidemics - such as the recent Ebola outbreak - inevitable. The debate explored why the Ebola outbreak was able to spread so widely, and looked at broader lessons about containing local epidemics in today’s globalised world. The expert panel included the Liberian ambassador to the UK [formerly to Ghana], the World Health Organisation’s representative in Ghana, the Operations Director of Medicins Sans Frontieres, and the Communications Minister for Ghana, as well as about a hundred other invited guests from Ghana and the worst-affected countries. As well as co-hosting the debate with BBC Africa presenter Akwasi Sarpong, Graham was interviewed about Ebola on local radio stations, BBC partner stations across Africa, and contributed to a live special editi

Congratulations to Tom Cowling from the Department of Primary Care and Public Health in the School of Public Health at Imperial College London for winning the the SAPC Early Career Researcher Prize at the 2015 South-East England Regional Meeting. Commenting on Tom's presentation , Jenni Burt from Cambridge University stated that: " There were some great presentations this year. I’ll single out Tom Cowling from Imperial College, who analysed national hospital administrative data to find that patients registered with general practices with poorer reported access had a higher rate of emergency admission to hospital via A&E than patients in practices with higher reported access. Much debate was had about the significance of this, but it was a really nice analysis: even Gary Abel our statistician said so, which is a rare accolade."