Researchers from the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, University of Oxford, have won two of the three Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Research Paper of the Year Awards 2025.
The awards recognise findings from the Remote by Default 2 programme – a major National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funded collaboration between Oxford, the University of Plymouth and the Nuffield Trust examining how UK general practice has adapted to hybrid models of care that combine face-to-face and remote consultations.
Understanding the realities of hybrid general practice
Health services research – winner: What are the challenges to quality in contemporary, hybrid general practice? A multi-site longitudinal study (British Journal of General Practice, published online 2024; print 2025).
Led by Dr Rebecca Payne – then an NIHR In-Practice Fellow at Oxford and now combining her DPhil with an academic role at Bangor University – the study followed practices in England, Scotland and Wales for more than two years. It shows that remote care works well for some people, for whom it offers timely and convenient access, yet complex systems can be hard to navigate and risk widening existing inequalities.
Staff were committed to high-quality care, but faced mounting pressures including high turnover, new supervisory demands as the general practice team expanded and the challenge of sustaining the human elements of care such as compassion and continuity when providing care at a distance. Digitalisation sometimes introduced new inefficiencies, and management of long-term conditions was variable. Wider system factors – austerity, constrained social care capacity, long hospital waiting lists and telephony or digital systems that were not fit for purpose – compounded the strain.
“General practitioners and their teams are committed to delivering high quality care, but this has become increasingly difficult in contemporary general practice. Many well-meaning initiatives intended to improve access and care for patients have had the opposite effect,” said Dr Payne.
Read the full story on the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences website.