Beyond A Radical Practice: A Bright Future for Primary Care?

GPs Katy Gardner, Iona Heath and Nadja Van Ginneken, with host, former BBC Radio Merseyside presenter Roger Phillips, discuss the ever-shifting role of general practice and primary care. 

Primary care has changed hugely in the last 40 years, mostly, but not always, for the better.  Princes Park Health Centre in Liverpool foreshadowed many improvements: engaging with patients as partners, being advocates, implementing evidence-based medicine and prevention.  

However, these developments have also had negative consequences, resulting in in primary health care becoming dominated by rules and tick boxes. People have become over medicalised and although IT has helped to make health care safer, it has reduced personal, face-to-face contact, creating potential barriers between people, especially those more vulnerable, and their health care teams. There’s been a reduction in continuity and relationship-based care, a change Dr Phil Whitaker (What is a Doctor? Canongate 2024) refers to as “taxi rank medicine”.  

Can we keep the positive developments, restore relationship-based care and have happier patients and GPs? How can we as people/patients/activists help to create a more hopeful future? 

Katy Garder (co-author of A Radical Practice and a GP) 

In 1973, while a medical student, Katy Gardner met Toxteth GP Dr Cyril Taylor and decided she would like to work with him in the future. She joined him at the newly opened Princes Park Health Centre in 1978 and stayed for 28 years, helping to make it a pioneering example of community-oriented primary care. She later worked at Marybone Health Centre in Vauxhall and with the Liverpool Cancer Team as a Macmillan GP. Katy retired in 2018, having been active in community projects and public health, especially in Liverpool 8, all her working life. She co-wrote the book A Radical Practice in Liverpool (Writing on the Wall, 2021) about Princes Park Health Centre, and now volunteers with the Friends of Princes Park and as co-chair of Central Liverpool Primary Care Network Patient Participation Group. 

A Radical Practice in Liverpool: the rise, fall and rise of Princes Park Health Centre, explores these questions in this history of the Liverpool 8 practice, founded by visionary practitioner and Labour councillor Dr Cyril Taylor. 

Buy A Radical Practice In Liverpool by Katy Gardner & Susanna Graham Jones – Writing on the Wall 

Iona Heath (former president of Royal College of GPs)

Iona Heath worked as an inner-city general practitioner in Kentish Town in London from 1975 to 2010 and she is a past President of the Royal College of General Practitioners. She has written regularly for the British Medical Journal and has contributed essays to many other medical journals across the world.  She has been particularly interested to explore the nature of general practice, the importance of medical generalism, issues of justice and liberty in relation to health care, the corrosive influence of the medical industrial complex and the commercialisation of medicine, and the challenges posed by disease-mongering, the care of the dying, and violence within families.  Her book John Berger: Ways of Learning will be published in the Oxford University Press series, My Reading in September 2024. 

Nadja Van Ginneken (ex GP at PPHC) 

Nadja van Ginneken is a General Practitioner with an academic background, working in an inner-city practice in Liverpool, UK. She is Deputy Research Lead across the Northwest Coast and encourages practices to take part in research projects that address health needs and redress health inequalities affecting Central Liverpool’s diverse, seldom-heard populations. Nadja is also Environmental Sustainability Lead to the network of 10 Central Liverpool GP practices and co-chair of Cheshire and Merseyside Greener Practice, and runs projects at both network- and regional- levels to implement the Primary Care Green Plan. Projects include decarbonising GP practices, deprescribing, greener respiratory care, air pollution, green social prescribing. 

Roger Phillips (facilitator) 

Roger Phillips was born in Manchester, went to Cambridge University, where he read medicine for a year and then switched to English! He arrived in Liverpool as an actor in the early 70s to join the Everyman Theatre – and fell in love with the city. He subsequently worked as a hackney cab driver, before falling by chance into local radio (BBC Radio Merseyside) in 1978, where he presented a daily 2-hour phone-in programme and a weekly interview programme, until he retired 3 years ago. 

Thursday 23rd May, 7pm 

Quaker Meeting House, Liverpool Quaker Meeting House, 22 School Lane
Liverpool, L1 3BT 

 £5 

Liverpool Quakers’ & customers will receive a 20% discount on parking at Q-Park Hanover Street by using the promocode QUAKERSLV when pre-booking through the website Q-Park

*These are difficult times. We know some people may struggle to afford full price tickets. If you would like to attend this event but can’t afford to, please contact info@writingonthewall.org.uk. All queries will be treated in confidence.    

If you would like to purchase a gifted ticket for someone who can’t afford it, please buy directly from the event page and we will offer your ticket out