Medical Students
Here at the practice we help to teach medical students who are training to become doctors. You may be asked if a student is able to sit in on your consultation and it would be helpful if you allow this although it will only ever be with your consent.
Medical students are bound by the same rules of confidentiality as all staff so you can be assured that anything you discuss while they are present will remain private.
Research
We have recently joined the West London Primary Health Care Research Network. This means that we will have the opportunity to get involved in exciting new research. This may mean that from time to time we will be looking at recruiting patients for clinical trials. As you may know a clinical trial is the method by which new treatments are introduced into medicine.
The general method is based on selecting a number of patients who would most likely provide a reasonable sample for the condition being tested. Typically the patients that are enrolled in a trial would be slip into two groups. One group being given the new treatment and the other group being given the traditional treatment or perhaps a dummy treatment. The results of how the patients get on in the two groups would then be reviewed to see if the new treatment being tested provided any improvement.
Clinical trials can take many years to complete and involve large numbers of patients – but they are we believe worthwhile as they eventually help many people, not only here in the UK, but elsewhere in the world.
Being involved in research is stimulating for the clinicians at the practice and also gets them involved in leading edge work that keeps the practice as whole up-to-date and this is going to help our patients get better care.
Over the coming years you may occasionally be contacted by someone form the practice asking you would like to be involved in one of these clinical trials. You are welcome to participate or not – it is entirely your own decision and it will not reflect in any way on the care that you receive from the practice.
All clinical trails have been checked and approved by the local ethics committee to ensure that they are properly managed and scientifically valid and medically useful.
We have recently been involved in the following trails:
- The study HIV prevalence in the community
- Alzheimer’s research