Centre for Primary Care

Centre Leads: Dr Anna De Simoni and Professor Jianhua Wu

Research Programme Manager: Charlotte Harding, c.harding@qmul.ac.uk

For all operational support, please contact: wiph-operations@qmul.ac.uk 

 

Transforming Primary Care through research, practice and education

The Centre for Primary Care encompasses the work of four Research Units, including the Primary Care Research Unit, The Clinical Effectiveness & Health Equity Unit, The Primary Care Epidemiology Research Unit and The Population and Precision Health Sciences Unit.  

 

• The Primary Care Unit brings together expert teams to carry out research into the environment, asthma and infection, multiple long-term conditions, and the complexity of everyday experience, healthcare interactions and working practices. Their works uses a wide range of methods including qualitative and mixed methods, natural experiments, modelling, intervention development and assessment, and research synthesis. 
• The Clinical Effectiveness Group (CEG) uses primary care health data for research, with a particular interest in reducing health inequalities and improving population health. The unit provides analyses, clinical tools, guidance and expertise to NHS primary care teams across North East London and leads the Wellcome Trust PhD programme 'Health Data in Practice'. CEG is a founding member of the Discovery Data Service, which integrates data from GPs, hospitals and community settings in near real-time.

• The Primary Care Epidemiology Unit (PCEU) is a multidisciplinary research team of clinicians, data scientists, epidemiologists, software developers and patients which undertakes large scale research into:

  • The natural history of a wide range of diseases in primary care to better understand who is most affected and how conditions develop and change over a person’s lifetime
  • The risks and benefits of new and commonly used medicines to help inform clinical decisions
  • The development, validation and implementation of widely used clinical risk tools in primary care to better identify those at high risk for interventions
    
    We make extensive use of a number of databases including QResearch. Set up by Professor Julia Hippisley-Cox in 2002, QResearch is the largest database of its kind worldwide, containing a wealth of longitudinal data from over 35 million people in over 1,500 UK practices linked to secondary care data for hospital admissions, mortality and cancer registration.
• The Population and Precision Health Sciences Unit is dedicated to transforming health outcomes equitably for diverse and underserved populations globally. We use a range of methods, including health data science, epidemiology, genomics, health services research, and health economics, to generate discoveries that can advance health and healthcare for all. Our team brings scientific and clinical expertise in diabetes, cardiometabolic disease, and primary healthcare. The Unit hosts two flagship studies within the Wolfson Institute of Population Health: Black Health Legacy and Genes & Health. Through these large-scale, community-embedded programmes, we apply advanced health data and genomic science to drive equitable precision medicine and inform healthcare policy.