Primary health care

Primary health care addresses the majority of a person's health needs throughout their lifetime. This includes physical, mental and social well-being and it is people-centred rather than disease-centred. The focus on the research project below is to develop education for students, clinicians and staff in primary care to support sustainable, evidence-based clinical decisions.

Sietse Wieringa

Portrait of Sietse Wieringa

Country of origin: Netherlands
Host: Professor Elin Olaug Rosvold
Group: Centre for Sustainable Healthcare Education
Thematic area: Primary Health Care Education
Subfield: Medical education, sustainable primary health care, general practice

Project title: Education for Sustainable Healthcare Decisions in Primary care

My project

This project is aimed to lay the foundations for education to make sustainable clinical decisions in primary care that not only take into account  patients preferences, clinical experience and findings from research, but also wider social, economic and environmental considerations. In order to do so, it includes research of the literature on sustainable healthcare education and decision making as well as interviews with students, GPs and other primary care staff, academic clinical teachers, institutions (including medical schools) and policy-makers to find out what is needed to make evidence-based sustainable healthcare decisions. The plan is to organise a training program through action research with students, teachers and primary care clinicians and bring findings together in a sustainable educational framework for primary care.

The anticipated scientific and non-scientific benefits and outcomes of this project are:
  • Better theory to support teaching and handling sustainable clinical decision making.
  • A tested training program for primary care trainees for sustainable evidence based clinical decision making.
  • A sustainable education framework to support
    • the design of other educational programs to help primary care staff and patients to take evidence based sustainable healthcare decisions
    • inform measures that healthcare organisations should have in place to support training and development for sustainable healthcare
    • on a system level, inform strategy around training and assessment to integrate sustainable healthcare and UN’s development goals in primary care
  • Promote interest of medical students in primary care and  research