Ensuring that health care professional students' are provided with accessible interprofessional learning within the practice placement setting can be challenging. This paper describes an interprofessional activity which enables students to experience interprofessional learning and working within the primary care setting and to consider the impact of effective teamwork on patient safety.Improving collaboration between primary care professional groups and improving patient safety are all part of the Scottish Government's recent national action plan to improve quality in primary health care settings. 1,2 This will undoubtedly impact on health and social care students approaching the end of their programmes of training and entering into the workforce. Preparing students for future collaborative practice and for providing quality care is the main goal of interprofessional learning (IPL). 3 It is possible to consider how the primary care setting can provide students with accessible IPL opportunities to reinforce the impact of collaboration on patient safety. This paper describes an IPL activity piloted with nursing and medical students in primary care placements. Students were provided with scheduled time together during their placements to explore the roles and responsibilities of the multidisciplinary team in meeting the health and social care needs of a patient.The Fife Interprofessional Clinical Skills Model for Education was established in 2009, as a collaborative initiative between the University of St. Andrews and University of Dundee. A pilot of interprofessional workshops in primary and secondary care settings helped to establish a programme of interprofessional workshops which currently run within students' practice placements. 4 Ensuring accessibility to all students spread across such a wide rural and urban geographical area has been a challenge. Workshops are currently run in areas where there are more likely to be larger clusters of students from different professional groups, to ensure an adequate interprofessional mix. Students within primary care usually attend the workshops if the practice is in close proximity to the workshop venue. However, it can be difficult for students located in more rural placements to attend these scheduled workshops, due to travel and time constraints. This has led to exploring how the programme could be widened to ensure students in primary care are offered the same IPL opportunities.The Leicester Model of Interprofessional Education was identified as an appropriate and relevant model to adapt and pilot. 5

ObjectivesHow medical students handle negative emotions expressed by simulated patients during Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCE) has not been fully investigated. We aim to explore (i) whether medical students respond differently to different types of patients’ emotional cues; and (2) possible effects of patients’ progressive disclosure of emotional cues on students’ responses.MethodsForty OSCE consultations were video recorded and coded for patients’ expressions of emotional distress and students’ responses using a validated behavioural coding scheme (the Verona Coding Definitions of Emotional Sequence). Logistic multilevel regression was adopted to model the probability of the occurrence of student reduce space response behaviour as a function of the number of patients’ expressions of emotional cues.ResultsWe found that medical students offered responses that differed to emotional cue types expressed by simulated patients. Students appeared to provide space to emotional cues when expressed in vague and unspecific words and reduce space to cues emphasizing physiological or cognitive correlates. We also found that medical students were less likely to explore patients’ emotional distress nearer the end of the consultation and when the duration of a patient speech turn got larger. Cumulative frequency of patients’ emotional cues also predicted students’ reduce space behaviour.Practical ImplicationsUnderstanding how medical students manage negative emotions has significant implications for training programme development focusing on emotion recognition skills and patient-centred communication approach. In addition, the statistical approaches adopted by this study will encourage researchers in healthcare communication to search for appropriate analytical techniques to test theoretical propositions.

Background Primary care practitioners (PCP) have a vital role in patient weight management. This study investigates knowledge, attitudes and practice of UK PCPs regarding patient weight management. Methods A cross-sectional questionnaire assessed PCP perceived knowledge, self-reported practice, attitudes towards overweight/obesity and actual knowledge regarding overweight and obesity management. Practitioners from NE Scotland were invited to participate. Results Participants comprised 107 PCPs. Most participants viewed management of overweight and obesity as core to their roles and 75% reported discussing weight with overweight/obese patients. Management techniques included discussion and advice provision. Behavioural change techniques (BCT) were reported infrequently, despite perceptions that patients lacked motivation to lose weight. A quarter of participants reported lack of training and a third reported inadequate skills to manage overweight/obese patients. Mean percent correct for knowledge questions was approximately 53%. Barriers to patient weight management included lack of specialists for referral and limited time. Conclusions This study confirmed a primary care role in managing weight in overweight/obese patients. Our finding that most participants reported discussing weight with their overweight or obese patients is unsupported by previously published research, however a more comprehensive sample of practitioners is required to scrutinise this disparity. Incongruence exists between practitioners' perceptions of difficulties associated with patient weight loss and the tools they use to address them. Inclusion of training in BCT, the provision of weight care specialists, or referral on to commercial weight loss organisations may provide more effective pathways for PCPs to assist weight loss for overweight/obese patients in primary care.

As new survey findings highlight the challenge of teacher mobility between schools, Alex Collinson offers three steps that school leaders can take to retain their teachers and recruit effectively