Professor Niro Siriwardena was a keynote speaker at the launch of PRIME Centre Wales on 22 September at the Preseli Room, Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. He spoke on quality improvement in primary and prehospital care covering issues such as what is quality, how can improvement be brought about through cooperation rather than competition, and what can ambulance services and primary care learn from each other. PRIME Centre Wales is a multi-university collaboration co-funded by the Welsh government to research primary and prehospital unscheduled care led by Professors Adrian Edwards, Cardiff University, director of PRIME with co-directors Prof Joyce Kenkre (University of South Wales), Prof Richard Neal (University of Bangor), and Prof Helen Snooks (Swansea University).
Other key speakers included the Welsh Health Minster, Prof Mark Drakeford who spoke on Welsh government policy on prudent health in primary and emergency care; Mr Simon Denegri, Chair of INVOLVE and National Director for Public Participation and Engagement in Research in his talk, entitled ‘Whose healthcare is it anyway?’ spoke about the importance and benefits of patient and public involvement in research; Dr Ruth Hussey, Chief Medical Officer for Wales in ‘Designing primary and emergency care services for a healthier, happier, fairer Wales’ focussed on equity; Prof Jean White, Chief Nursing Officer for Wales in ‘Developing our primary and emergency care workforce in Wales’ covered workforce challenges and priorities.
There were posters showing the work of the centre and a range of workshops after lunch covering issues such as direction setting, lay involvement, the practice research incentive scheme and study design. The final keynote was given by Dr Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the BMJ, who covered important challenges for research including open data, overdiagnosis and medicalisation, and treatment burden which the journal were championing.