Centenary for the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine: a conference, awards for medical writing and new associate memberships

The Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine is organising its Centenary Conference, which is to be held on 7^th December at the Royal College of Physicians in London. The December 2018 FPM Centenary Conference will include a poster awards session showcasing national and international studies aimed at Transforming Health. The Conference will be eligible for 6 CPD points.

Register for the Conference 

Submit an abstract for the Transforming Health poster session at the 7th December Conference.

Talks by expert clinicians will provide updates on best medical practice in diagnostics and new therapies with regard to common serious clinical disorders, ranging from lung disease to cancer, stroke and cardiac disease, liver problems  and other serious clinical disease. Speakers will also discuss management of new clinical challenges, including antibiotic resistance, the impact of ageing on co-morbidity, and other important current challenges for clinical practice.

Speakers and discussants will include Professor Christopher Byrne, University of Southampton on Identifying and managing non-alcoholic fatty liver disease, Professor Peter Barnes FRS, National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College, with updates on treating asthma and COPD, Professor Tom Kirkwood CBE, University of Newcastle, on ageing, health and multi-morbidity, Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed, University of Liverpool NHS Chair of Pharmacogenetics on applying personalised medicine in clinical practice. Dr Tim Nicholson, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s Medical School, on functional neurological disorders and Professor Anthony Rudd, Guy’s and St Thomas’s, National Clinical Director for Stroke with NHS England, on reducing the severity of stroke. FPM President Donald Singer FPM journal editors Bernard Cheung (Postgraduate Medical Journal) and Ken Redekop (Health Policy and Technology) will give a brief overview of the FPM and its activities.
 

The FPM is a British non-profit organisation founded in the autumn of 1919 as a merger of the Fellowship of Medicine and the Postgraduate Medical Association, with Sir William Osler as its first president. Its initial aims were the development of educational programmes in all branches of postgraduate medicine. The FPM now organises clinical and research meetings and publishes two journals. The FPM has since 1925 published the international journal, the Postgraduate Medical Journal. In 2012 the Fellowship launched a new international journal, Health Policy and Technology, published on the Fellowship’s behalf by Elsevier.

The Postgraduate Medical Journal publishes topical reviews, commentaries and original papers on themes across the medical spectrum. It provides continuing professional development for all doctors, from those in training, to their teachers, and active clinicians, by publishing papers on a wide range of topics relevant to clinical practice. Papers published in PMJ describe current practice and new developments in all branches of medicine; describe relevance and impact of translational research on clinical practice; provide background relevant to examinations; and papers on medical education and medical education research.

The FPM’s peer-reviewed journal Health Policy and Technology focuses on past, present and future health policy and the role of technology in clinical and non-clinical national and international health environments. It aims to foster closer links with policy-makers, health professionals, health technology providers, patient groups and academia.

Further ways in which the FPM will mark its anniversary  include introducing a new Associate Member category for the FPM and launch of new international awards for excellence in medical writing by doctors in social media.

The new Associate Member category for the FPM will be open to doctors in established postgraduate training posts, to senior doctors in established posts and to other experts who are interested in postgraduate medicine. Authors and reviewers for the official journals of the FPM – Health Policy and Technology and the Postgraduate Medical journal will be entitled to a reduced membership fee for their first year as Associate Members. Benefits for Associate Members will include a reduction in the registration fee for attending FPM educational events and a reduced annual electronic subscription to the PMJ or HPT journal. See the FPM website for more details about how to apply to become anAssociate Member of the FPM .

The FPM will also launch international awards to recognise best social media writing on medical themes.  To be eligible, articles should be aimed at increasing understanding by the public and health professionals of important health-related issues. Articles published online since 1st January 2018 will be eligible.

Up to 5 awards of £100 each will initially be made – one for each major geographical region: the Americas, Europe, Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia and Australia/New Zealand.  The judging panel will include health professionals from the FPM and from the Editorial Boards of HPT and the PMJ and experts in social media. Winning writers will have the opportunity to publish their award-winning article in HPT or the PMJ, depending on the theme of the article.

See the FPM website for details of how to enter for the writing awards.

Creativity and compassion: winners of the 2018 FPM Hippocrates Open and Health Professional Prize for Poetry and Medicine

Joanne Key from England has been announced by judge Mark Doty as the winner of the 2018 FPM Hippocrates Open Prize for Poetry and Medicine at an awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Her winning poem was Colony which concerned the distress of her father during his final illness.

Also competing for the FPM Hippocrates Open Prize were Sarah Ann Leavesley from Droitwich in England who was awarded 2nd Prize for At breaking point, and jointly sharing the 3rd Prize Aniqah Choudhri from Didsbury in England for Repeat Prescriptions and Raphael Dagold from Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan for Pharmacology.

Donald Singer, judge Mark Doty, FPM Health Professional winner Inez Garzaniti, judge Alisha Kaplan, Michael Hulse and Rafael Campo at the awards event in Chicago

Mark Doty announced Inez Garzaniti from Pontiac in the USA as the winner of the 2018 FPM Hippocrates Open Prize for Poetry and Medicine for Cranial Nerve Shadowbox which was inspired by the functions and dysfunctions of cranial nerves.

Also in the running for the FPM Hippocrates Health Professional Prize were surgeon Stephen Harvey from Nashville in the USA who was awarded 2nd Prize for The Thirteenth Floor, and sharing the 3rd Prize Maria Ji from Onehunga in New Zealand for Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Patient and Emma Storr from Leeds in England for Six Week Check.

FPM Hippocrates Open Prize winner Joanne Key

The judges for the Open and Health Professional awards were Carol Rumens from Bangor in North Wales, Peter Goldsworthy from Adelaide in Australia and Mark Doty from New York City. They also agreed commendations for entrants from Australia, Canada, New Zealand, England, Northern Ireland, Norway, Sweden and the USA – 19 in the Open category and 20 in the Health Professional Category.

Hippocrates Young Poet Prize winner Taylor Fang

Taylor Fang from Logan, Utah, USA was announced by judge Alisha Kaplan as the winner of the 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize for Poetry and Medicine at the awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago. Her winning poem was Letter to Body Made Hollow and she was also shortlisted for On the Evolution of Cancer.

With an awards fund of £5500 the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine is one of the highest value poetry awards in the world for a single unpublished poem. The 2018 Hippocrates Prize is supported by medical charity the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine and the healthy heart charity the Cardiovascular Research Trust.

Entries for the 2018 Hippocrates prize were received from 37 countries and from 5 continents.

Commended poets with judges and organisers in Chicago

Judge Carol Rumens said: “A good poem is like a blood transfusion. It replenishes the body of words, the language in which the poem is written. These prize-winning and commended poems sometimes highlight the metaphorical possibilities of a scientific vocabulary: one of the valuable aspects of the Hippocrates Prize is that it encourages such creative cross-fertilisation. But they also demonstrate that the borders stereotypically perceived between art and science cease to matter in the heat of imaginative and lived engagement.“ 

 

She added: “The health professionals write with empathy and a sense of mystery, the ‘open category’ writers summon descriptive precision.  Their forms are rarely traditional, but grow organically from the subject or the experience. So these poems celebrate language itself, while relocating bodily events to a less time-haunted region, and transforming some of the loneliest  aspects of human experience to the most vividly connective.“

Judge Mark Doty said: “Caring for the marvelous and fragile thing a human body is, those who work in the healing professions live in intimate relation with what it is to be alive. Every day they face our vulnerability, as well as their own.  That’s why so many have second lives as poets; writing can be a way to keep their own hearts open, giving form to feeling they must often hold at bay while they attend to what patients need.”

He added: ”The humane and moving work shortlisted for the Hippocrates Poetry Prizes testify to the power of poetry to help us to negotiate the difficult. In carefully crafted, artful language, they demonstrate how the wellspring of compassion renews itself In us again and again.”

Judge Peter Goldsworthy said: ”Sometimes pus, sometimes a poem…but always pain,’ the Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai wrote, a near-perfect poetic distillation of the costs of creativity, at least ‘sometimes’    Of course not all great art has its genesis in pain, and not all pain – not even a fraction – leads to the partial consolations of art.  But if lancing an abscess is the surest way to healing,  poetry can  offer that same cleansing of emotional wounds – at least, again, ‘sometimes’.   As can humour;  and jokes are a species of poem, sharing its same search for precision, density, rhythm, timing – perfection.”

He added: ”There are many species of  poem  here – dark, poignant, epigrammatic  celebratory, funny – which caused me many headaches when judging their merits.  How to separate apples from oranges – and grapes, and melons, and durians?   In the end I can only applaud the  endless capacity of  the poets  – and the language –  for creativity, for compassion, for generosity, for courage under fire – and all their various subspecies of humour.”

See more on the shortlisted and commended poets on the Hippocrates Poetry website.

The winners were announced at the 2018 Hippocrates Awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago from 4pm on Friday 11th May when the Hippocrates Awards Anthology was launched. There was also a reading at the Poetry Foundation by Mark Doty from 7pm on Thursday 10th May, an accompanying conference on poetry and medicine that morning and afternoon at Northwestern University in Chicago, and a workshop on poetry, medicine and art at Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art on Friday evening, 11th May.

The winning, shortlisted and commended poems in the 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize have been published in the 2018 Hippocrates Prize Anthology which was launched at the 2018 Hippocrates Awards ceremony at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago on Friday 11th May.

Since it was launched in 2010, the Hippocrates Prize has attracted over 8000 entries from over 60 countries, from the Americas to Fiji and from Finland to Australasia.
___________________________________________________________________________
Notes for editors
For photos of finalists, biographies and extracts of their poems, call 07494 450805  or email hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com
The Hippocrates Initiative – winner of the 2011 Times Higher Education Award for Innovation and  Excellence in the Arts – is an interdisciplinary venture that investigates the relationship between medicine and poetry.

More on support for the 2018 Hippocrates Awards for Poetry and Medicine

The 2018 Hippocrates Open Awards and Health Professional Awards are supported by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine. The FPM is a UK medical society founded in 1918, which publishes the international journals the Postgraduate Medical Journal and Health Policy and Technology.

The 2018 Hippocrates Young Poets Prize is supported by the Cardiovascular Research Trust, a healthy heart charity founded in 1996, which promotes research and education for the prevention and treatment of disorders of the heart and circulation. The charity has a particular interest in avoiding preventable heart disease through educating school students.

The 9th Annual Symposium on Poetry and Medicine is supported by:

• Center for Bioethics & 
Medical Humanities, Northwestern University 
Feinberg School of Medicine
• Harvard Medical School
• Hippocrates Initiative 
for Poetry & Medicine
• The Poetry Foundation

Coffee and herbal ‘cigarettes’ once popular treatments for asthma: talks from PMJ 90th Anniversary

Condition used to be regarded as psychosomatic and brought on by stress

Strong black coffee and herbal ‘cigarettes’ were once popular treatments for asthma, which used to

be thought of as a psychosomatic condition, brought on by stress, reveals a review of the evolution of common respiratory diseases over the past century.

The review, presented by Peter Barnes, Professor of Thoracic Medicine and Head of Respiratory Medicine at the National Heart and Lung Institute, Imperial College London, is one of a series of historical perspectives on key aspects of health and medicine, and their relevance to future practice, delivered by distinguished clinicians at a symposium in London today for the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine (FPM).*

See programme and speaker abstracts and biographies

The lectures mark the 90th anniversary of Postgraduate Medical Journal, which began publishing in 1925, the year television pictures were first transmitted by Logie Baird and enclosed double decker buses were introduced to London’s streets.

In ancient times, asthma used to be treated with various herbal extracts, derived from horsetail, thorn-apple, and deadly nightshade (belladonna), and available as a tincture or in “asthma cigarettes.”

By the 1850s the use of strong black coffee was recommended to treat symptoms, and by the early 20th century adrenal gland extract, from which adrenaline is derived, emerged as an effective airway opener (bronchodilator) followed by the discovery in the 1920s that theophylline, which occurs naturally in tea, was similarly effective.

The adrenal gland was a source of another treatment for asthma—steroids, the precursor to the mainstay of treatment today. Glucorticosteroids were first extracted in the 1940s, when adrenaline also became available as an inhaled treatment for the first time.

During this period in history, asthma was thought of as a largely psychosomatic condition, brought on by stress. It wasn’t until the 1980s, when chronic inflammation was recognised as a key factor in the airway restriction that characterises the condition.

In 1925 patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), which includes emphysema and bronchitis, were treated with the same bronchodilators used for asthma. Now long acting bronchodilators and their combination are the treatments of choice, although they don’t work as well in COPD as they do in asthma.

But oxygen was considered to be dangerous and only became available in the 1980s. New treatments for COPD that dampen down the underlying inflammation are urgently needed but have proved difficult to develop.

In another presentation, looking towards the future, Professor Karol Sikora, Medical Director of CancerPartnersUK, points out that cancer could well become a long term condition in 20 years’ time. But this promise critically depends on sustained investment in innovative diagnostics and therapies, such as robotics, genomics, biosensors, and personalised medicine.

He suggests that as the population continues to age, and the prevalence of cancer rises, the interaction of four factors will determine the future success of curbing deaths from the disease: new technology; society's willingness to pay; evolving healthcare delivery systems; and the financial mechanisms that underpin them.

Other speakers include Professor Dame Carol Black, principal of Newnham College Cambridge and past president of the Royal College of Physicians, who will talk about the opportunities to improve public health by focusing on workplace health; Professor Sir Munir Pirmohamed, David Weatherall Chair in Medicine at the University of Liverpool who will outline progress in the use of personalised medicine; and Dr Paul Nunn, former Coordinator, WHO Tuberculosis Programme, who will cover  the epidemiology and treatment of TB.

Details of all the other speakers and the topics they will be covering are available here: http://fpostgradmed.blogspot.co.uk

Commenting on the relevance and significance of the symposium, FPM President, Professor Donald Singer said: “Today’s symposium showcases many of the tremendous advances in medicine over the past 9 decades. Yet many of the medical challenges present in the 1920s still need further research and more global investment in health systems in developed and less developed regions. “

He added “The Postgraduate Medical Journal continues to play an important role in publishing new medical research and in educating young doctors and their teachers around the world.”

Notes for editors:

*90th Anniversary of the Postgraduate Medical Journal: Medicine from 1925 to 2015 One Day Symposium - 1st October 2015, Medical Society of London

Postgraduate Medical Journal is one of more than 50 specialist journals published by BMJ, which publishes the title on behalf of the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine.

http://pmj.bmj.com

The Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine, founded in 1918, pioneered educational programmes in all branches of postgraduate medicine. The FPM publishes 2 international journals: the Postgraduate Medical Journal since 1925 and Health Policy and Technology since 2012.

Further information (including contact details for the speakers)

Emma Dickinson, Media Relations Manager, BMJ, BMA House, London, UK

Tel: + 44 (0) 207 383 6529

Email: edickinson@bmj.com

Hippocrates initiative for poetry and medicine: first 3 years

M Henry, CK Stead, DRJ Singer, T Torrington,
W French, D Abse  © The Hippocrates Press

@HealthMed The 2nd Annual evening event organized by the Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine was devoted to an update on the Hippocrates initiative for poetry and medicine for which the FPM is a major patron. The initiative combines annual international and NHS related awards, academic symposia, a research forum and publications of outcomes as anthologies, journal papers and other related content on the relationship between medicine and poetry.

Following a review of the Hippocrates initiative, poets described the inspiration for their poems then gave readings from their winning entries from the first 3 years of the Hippocrates Awards: Michael Henry, the patellar hammer used by his orthopaedic surgeon father; Wendy French - scenes from her doctor father's life, beginning with disappointment at news from Sir Alexander Fleming of no penicillin available for a sick patient; Tricia Torrington the shrinking world of a relative's experience of the frailty of ageing; CK Stead his own experience of stroke and recovery, expressed through the voice of the Roman poet Catullus as told to an amanuensis. Poet and doctor Dannie Abse went on to give a reading from a series of his poems with themes from the soul to side-effects, closing with his recent 'Blue song'.

The evening closed with a panel discussion, the contributors discussing their approach for moving from idea to poem; the role of linguistic content; engaging the reader; artefacts as inspiration for medical poetry; the impact of personal experience of illness on the poet; use of humour within discussion of challenging medical themes; the process of developing the finished poem; and combining the personal and universal within poetry.

Date
Monday 18th June 2012

Venue

Chandos House ©HealthMed

Chandos House, 2 Queen Anne Street, London

Programme

The Hippocrates initiative for poetry and medicine

Professor Donald Singer, President, FPM

Readings by Winners of Hippocrates Awards
Michael Henry, Gloucester - 2011 Open winner

Wendy French, London - 2010 NHS winner and 2011 NHS 2nd Prize

Tricia Torrington, Gloucester - 2012 NHS commended award

CK Stead ONZ, CBE, Aukland, New Zealand - 2010 Open winner

Reading - Dannie Abse, CBE: inaugural Hippocrates Awards judge

Panel discussion

For information on future events related to the Hippocrates initiative:
hippocrates.poetry@gmail.com

Health Policy and Technology launched by FPM and Elsevier

@HealthMed The Fellowship of Postgraduate Medicine, in partnership with international publisher Elsevier, has launched the first issue of a major new international journal - Health Policy and Technology.

The first issue includes a paper on the pioneering new Centre for Health Technology Assessment of Devices and Diagnostics within the UK’s National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), and papers on e-health from the USA, India and Europe. 

There is also the first of a series of interviews in print, online and as podcasts, with international leaders in the field of health policy and technology, beginning with Sir Michael Rawlins, Chairman of NICE.

The next policy maker to be featured in this series (June 2012 issue of HPT) will be Professor Gonzalo Calvo, former chair of the European Medicines Agency Cardiovascular Working Party, and Chair of the European Association of Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics, which represents the national clinical pharmacology societies from the 29 established and accession countries in Europe and their ~4000 clinical pharmacologist members.

Background to new journal and to the FPM.