Primary Health Care specialist group: About us
Founded in 1980, the PHCSG is one of the oldest informatics groups. It was founded by John Perry, an inspirational clinical informatician (although the term was not invented back then), with a conference in Oxford.
The group is unique in bringing together all disciplines involved in primary care informatics, both clinical and non clinical and we believe this is of vital importance. It provides a two-way link between cutting-edge development and grass-roots practice.
Our main focus is the development and dissemination of best practice in primary care informatics, and we seek to influence policy makers to ensure the effective application of informatics for the benefit of patients.
We are keen to see the development of a professional informatics workforce with a proper career structure and see registering with Fed-IP or belonging to the BCS Faculty of Health and Care as key to success.
We want to hear from anyone registering with Fed-IP or considering doing so, how we can support you in you informatics journey? We want to encourage people in their early years of their informatics careers. We have annual awards as both an early year prize (the Hildi Franke Prize) as well as Primary Care Travel Awards (the Julian Costello Prize) for early career informaticians to attend the Medical Informatics Europe Conference. Please see our Prizes and awards page for more information.
What we do
We organise an annual conference for members other informaticians. We also organise an Education day, which we endeavour to put on free, for those working at the coal face of Primary Care, with he intention of generally raising the standard of use of digital technologies. Making IT good for Primary Care and thus for society as a whole.
We also organise Special Interest group meetings to focus on particular issues of the time.
Membership
We are a specialist group of the BCS and if you are not yet a member of BCS, you can join individually or as part of a group of at least five from the same organisation at a reduced rate.
Membership is individually based and will transfer with a member should they leave their current employer.
The minimum requirement to access our benefits is Associate BCS Membership.
Benefits:
- Access to our Special Interest Groups
- Access to our Professional Network of Specialists
- Significant discount for our conference
- The group has a seat on the BCS Health Executive and the Joint GP IT committee through which views of the group can be channelled.
As part of BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT our members are able to take advantage of member benefits and being part of the professional body for IT with over 60,000 members worldwide.
Join us
Become a BCS member and start networking with like-minded professionals in our Primary Health Care Specialist group.
