Ubi Scientia in the midst of the cosy cardigans of Caritas

Checkland’s letter raises important concerns about barriers to engagement between academic and ‘applied’ primary care settings.¹ Academic primary care is a distinct scientific discipline working within, and alongside, primary care to support and challenge practice through scholarly activity. Issues related to scientific rigour and trustworthiness of scholarly activity, along with the evaluative validity/utility and coherence of ideas are of importance in both the academic and applied settings. Identifying how best to integrate these two perspectives highlights a key challenge to engagement; in thinking about how we communicate ideas about, and the results of, academic practice and scholarly activity. These are issues that the Society for Academic Primary Care (SAPC) is actively debating and addressing and are reflected in our revised position statement.²

The 2012 SAPC conference will be held jointly with the Royal College of General Practitioners, bringing academic and applied practice together in one meeting. We are revising the abstract submission process to require an explicit description of the utility and significance of the submitted work for primary care practice and policy. We are programming workshops that address the utility of sociological scholarly activity in the consultation room and the latest evidence-base on commissioning. And we will be introducing a new festival of dangerous ideas,³ the use of scholarly activity to challenge, spark news ideas, and identify and promote change.

We will be posting plans for 2012 on our website as they emerge. We welcome comments on these ideas. And invite everyone, including Dr Checkland, to join us at the 2012 meeting.⁴