Members of the CaHRU in collaboration with RCGP examinations were awarded in 2024 the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Research Paper of the Year 2023, Category 3: Medical Education, for their paper, ‘Academic performance of ethnic minority versus White doctors in the MRCGP assessment 2016-2021: cross sectional study. BJGP 2023; 73 (729): e284-e293 (https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2022.0474).’ The authors were Prof Niro Siriwardena, Dr Vanessa Botan, and Prof Graham Law from CaHRU and Dr Nicki Williams, Dr Kim Emerson, Dr Fiona Kameen, and Professors Lindsey Pope, Adrian Freeman from the RCGP examinations team. Prof Siriwardena presented the study at the RCGP conference in Liverpool at a session chaired by Prof Carolyn Chew Graham of Keele University and received the prize certificate from Dr Victoria Tzortziou-Brown from QMUL.
This was the first study to investigate differential attainment in all components of UK GP licensing assessments, including knowledge tests, clinical and workplace-based assessments, taking into account scores at the point of selection into GP specialty training. After careful analysis, taking known potential factors into account, the team found that doctors from ethnic minority backgrounds did not have a lower chance of passing GP licensing tests once sex, place of primary medical qualification, declared disability, and selection (Multi- Specialty Recruitment Assessment [MSRA]) scores were considered. The authors suggest that doctors admitted to GP specialty training, who are in the lowest MSRA score bands at selection, are more likely to need additional support during training to maximise their chances of achieving licensing, regardless of their ethnic group or other demographic characteristics. The study has been publicised on the WISEGP website (https://www.wisegp.co.uk/teaching-and-mentoring/support-your-practice-team).
This is the third time that the team has won Research Paper of the Year in Medical Education, having previously won in 2019 and 2021 so this was the third win in this category in the past five years. CaHRU were also highly commended in the RCGP Research Paper of the Year 2023 award, Category 1 – Clinical Research, for their paper with Oxford and Manchester Universities, ‘Clinical and cost-effectiveness of nurse-delivered sleep restriction therapy for insomnia in primary care (HABIT): a pragmatic, superiority, open-label, randomised controlled trial’, published in The Lancet (https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(23)00683-9).