Island doctors get the best presents… that’s dinner sorted for the best part of a week!

In my favourite hotel. Annandale Water Days Inn - with balcony and lake you feel like you’ve got a top class chalet at centre parks but at a fraction of the price!

Delivering primary care through a plethora of different modalities - phone, text, app and in person needs every person in the practice trained and confident. We developed a FREE and evidence based whole-team training package - see new paper and linked below qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/qhc/...

A moment of calm on a busy day as I wait to pick up a nurse from the ferry

Fun evening at lifeboat training with the team practising firing rockets with a rope on the end…

The practice IT is on the blink. Trying to choose calm despite the chaos.. Views like this help

Back on Hoy island doctoring… summer in the Orkney islands is the loveliest time of year with long days, Oyster catchers in the fields and lupins by the roadside

Help us fix this problem by answering a one question anonymous survey forms.office.com/pages/respon...

BJGP@bjgp.org · 4mo ago

What counts as #UrgentCare differs across healthcare settings. A UK-wide, single, shared definition will support safer triage, better workforce models & meaningful national monitoring; enabling patients to access care in the right place, right time doi.org/10.3399/BJGP... @oohgpwales.bsky.social

What counts as #UrgentCare differs across healthcare settings. A UK-wide, single, shared definition will support safer triage, better workforce models & meaningful national monitoring; enabling patients to access care in the right place, right time doi.org/10.3399/BJGP... @oohgpwales.bsky.social

New from academic GP @oohgpwales.bsky.social Why I can't be replaced by a bot theconversation.com/why-ai-healt...

Why AI health chatbots won’t make you better at diagnosing yourself – new research

A chatbot might know what’s wrong with you, but when people try to use them to understand symptoms, they may end up no closer to the answer.

theconversation.com

New in BMJ: Remote consultations now make up 38.5% of GP appointments in England (Dec 2025). But a new shift is emerging 👇 GPs delivering care from overseas. What does this mean for safety, continuity, and equity

GPs, AI isn’t about to take your job… but it might be after your secretary’s…. bjgplife.com/ai-in-primar...

AI in primary care: Secretary, not physician – BJGP Life

bjgplife.com

Time to start giving your kids their medication as tablets instead of liquids? Link to academic paper in article. By @oohgpwales.bsky.social theconversation.com/kids-can-tak...

Kids can take tablets, so why are we still giving liquid medicines?

Liquid medicines are often messy, expensive and hard to give so why do they remain the default?

theconversation.com

New paper alert… thread below www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

How a lack of visual fidelity in patient-generated images risks compromising care

Internationally, contemporary primary care is reliant on digital visual information, often generated by the patient through the use of their smartphone. Primary care physicians and their teams routine...

thelancet.com

Cannon mounted… Hoy is ready for Napoleon.

The Hoy Head steaming in to pick us up

At the bus stop bright and early for the next stage of the journey / bus and then ferry over to Hoy. It’s windy and cold and I’m grateful for the padded waterproof onesie purchased in the Falklands (yes I did brush my hair this morning, but no amount of brushing can compensate for Orkney wind!)

Made it to Kirkwall. In a rare feat of organisation I’ve bought biscuits IN ADVANCE as thankyous for all the people who always end up going above and beyond to help me as island doctor - volunteer ambulance crew and ferry crew in particular… impressed by this unusual level of personal organisation 😂

Switching back from academic to island GP… by 10am tomorrow the metamorphosis will be complete. Looking forward to wielding a stethoscope rather than a keyboard and to wearing my many-pocketed-trousers again. (Back in Bangor 9th March, not leaving for good!)

⚠️ Despite all the hype, chatbots still make terrible doctors. Out today is the largest user study of language models for medical self-diagnosis. We found that chatbots provide inaccurate and inconsistent answers, and that people are better off using online searches or their own judgment.

Plenty of press coverage tonight for one of the most important papers I’ve been involved with… www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

AI chatbots give inaccurate medical advice says Oxford Uni study

It found people using AI for health reasons found it hard to identify what advice they should trust.

bbc.co.uk

New paper alert! innovations.bmj.com/content/earl... Lead author and medical student Aleks Tanaka did a brilliant job on this paper looking at whether drones in healthcare are ready to fly (read it to find out!)

No. 4 #BJGPTop10 Hybrid general practice: Risks of hybrid general practice and its challenges to quality care doi.org/10.3399/BJGP... @trishgreenhalgh.bsky.social @oohgpwales.bsky.social #HybridCare #DigitalHealth #HealthcareInnovation #HealthPolicy #HealthTech #PrimaryCare #BJGP #research

Happy new year! If your eyes glaze over when people start talking philosophy in research, then read this! Proud to have been a co-author on this paper explaining why the assumptions we make about the world matter for our research bjgp.org/content/76/7...

‘You can mix your methods, but you can’t mix your paradigms’: a guide to ontology and epistemology for the confused researcher

Research is an attempt to find out something useful about the world. Whether we like it or not, how we choose our methods, conduct data analysis, and draw conclusions flow from our underpinning assump...

bjgp.org

Happy new year! If your eyes glaze over when people start talking philosophy in research, then read this! Proud to have been a co-author on this paper explaining why the assumptions we make about the world matter for our research bjgp.org/content/76/7...

‘You can mix your methods, but you can’t mix your paradigms’: a guide to ontology and epistemology for the confused researcher

Research is an attempt to find out something useful about the world. Whether we like it or not, how we choose our methods, conduct data analysis, and draw conclusions flow from our underpinning assump...

bjgp.org

@bjgp.bsky.social any chance of putting qr codes on your research pages to link to the full research paper?

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025... the bishop speaks for me… the bible is crystal clear on the need to care for the vulnerable and to welcome foreigners. Government policy is out of line here.

Anglican bishop shaken ‘to the core’ by home secretary’s asylum seeker comments

Bishop of Edmonton says people coming to UK are being ‘scapegoated’ for years of policy failures

theguardian.com

“This is a call to ensure that the future of health is not defined solely by those with the most data, the most money, or the most influence, but by those who centre equity, prevention, and the well-being of populations…” read more here www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Mind the (widening) gap: why public health must engage with AI now

This commentary aims to highlight the opportunities and challenges that Artificial Intelligence (AI) presents for public health.Narrative commentary a…

sciencedirect.com

Very proud of son who has passed his driving test, and absolutely horrified at the cost of car insurance for young drivers (and that’s for a 7 year old corsa!). Any tips?