Members of the CaHRU team and School of Health & Social Care had a strong presence at the conference the 44th Annual Conference of the Society for Academic Primary Care (SAPC) from 8th to 10th July at the University of Oxford. After an entertaining train journey to the historical Oxford, we had our first glimpses of the beautiful surroundings we were to spend the following three days.
On the first day there was great interest in Coral Sirdifield’s poster “Comparing what patients value and what they experience in English general practice: a cross sectional survey“. Ana Godoy Caballero and Despina Laparidou also had lively conversations while presenting their posters on “Patient values and patient experiences in English general practice: a comparison by patient characteristics” and “Psycho-educational interventions for informal caregivers of people with dementia: a systematic review“.
In the evening we were treated to “Drinks with the Dinosaurs” at the museum of Natural History which was a fantastically unique setting to mingle with fellow SAPC attendees.
The second day was full of thought-provoking talks, especially the “Dangerous Ideas” session which was extremely popular and lead to some heated discussions. Dr Zahid Asghar gave a brilliant elevator pitch on “Bisphosphonates and risk of stroke: self-controlled case series study“, followed by Ana Godoy Caballero 
who gave an equally brilliant elevator pitch on “Bisphosphonates and risk of stroke: matched case-control study“. After a busy second day, we got dressed up and attended a wonderful formal dinner at Keble College where many gasped at how “Harry Potter” the setting was.
The final day was as equally jam-packed as previous days with posters and oral presentations. Posters were presented by Jolien Vos on “Applicability of the Health Information Technology Acceptance Model in assessing readiness of older patients with multiple chronic diseases to adopt telecare – qualitative study” and Professor Niro Siriwardena presented Fiona Togher’s poster on “The development of a Patient Reported Experience Measure (PREM) for use in UK ambulance services“. Jolien Vos also gave a superb oral presentation on “Cast adrift in the care system? A systematic 
scoping review of care navigation for older people with multimorbidity“, which provided a popular talking point during the elderly care and dementia session. Finally, Rebecca Porter’s poster presentation of “Mr Grumpy becomes Mr Happy: Effective sleep treatment using community pharmacists” was voted best poster by delegates! Mr Grumpy becomes Mr Happy was also one of 11 projects to be presented on the SAPC blog, an amazing achievement for Mr Grumpy!
The SAPC conference was full of great accomplishments for the University of Lincoln and we are all looking forward to next year’s conference in Dublin.
Rebecca Porter