New institute founded to strengthen general practice and outpatient care

The Faculty of Health at Witten/Herdecke University (UW/H) has set itself the goal of playing a positive role in shaping change in healthcare. This includes, in particular, primary healthcare provided by general practitioners with a wide range of different reasons for treatment in all age groups. To this end, it is pooling its activities in general practice teaching and research and has now founded the Institute of General Practice and Primary Care (iamag).

As the first university location in Germany, the UW/H now has two chairs involved in the institute, "General Practice I and Interprofessional Care" (held by Prof. Klaus Weckbecker, MD) and "General Practice II and Patient Orientation in Primary Care" (held by Prof. Achim Mortsiefer, MD) via two W3 professorships for general practice. "GPs look after the vast majority of the population and are the basis of our healthcare system, as we have now also seen in the coronavirus vaccination campaign. It is therefore also important that general practice is adequately represented in research and teaching at universities. The UW/H was the first university to implement this with two chairs of general practice and is thus the pioneer of an overdue development," says Prof Weckbecker.

Strengthening general practice in studies and research

With the establishment of the institute, general practice will play a more central role in the study of medicine in the future and the teaching area "Outpatient Healthcare" will be strengthened as a special profile feature of the model degree programme at Witten/Herdecke University. "'Practice meets teaching' has always been a motto of general practice teaching at UW/H. We are now creating the appropriate structures and can inspire students every day with exciting cases from practice for outpatient healthcare. GP diagnostics such as ultrasound and ECG are now also integrated into GP teaching," says Professor Mortsiefer.

In terms of research, the new institute will work on the Faculty of Health's focus area of "Integrative and personalised/person-centred healthcare" and cooperate with the "Interdisciplinary Centre for Health Services Research" (IZVF) at Witten/Herdecke University. "Our laboratory is practice. We develop research questions from everyday practice. We are currently looking at the care of people without insurance, the care of people undergoing palliative treatment or how to avoid taking too much medication in old age. Our research is - like daily practice - very diverse," adds Klaus Weckbecker.