Nadja van Ginneken – NIHR Academic Clinical Lecturer in General Practice

During this time my trainers agreed to me taking 6 months off twice to develop my public health and international health interests. This allowed me to do the Diploma in Tropical Medicine and Hygiene (2005), and evaluate a community health worker programme in Senegal (2004). After my GP training, I was awarded a Wellcome Trust scholarship to undertake a Masters in Public Health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (2007). My Masters summer project allowed me to continue my interest in community health worker programmes; I explored the history of these programmes in South Africa during the transition from apartheid to democracy. The project’s success encouraged me to pursue academia. In 2009 I was awarded a Wellcome Trust clinical PhD fellowship to explore rural programmes that provide primary mental health care through non-specialist health workers in India.

I completed my PhD in February 2015. The academic clinical lecturer (ACL) post in general practice (which I started in March 2015) is a fantastic stepping stone to further develop my research career in primary mental healthcare, whilst still maintaining my clinical work in general practice. I am now in the process of applying my international knowledge to the UK context. With a research team at the university we are building a proposal to develop community and primary care based interventions to address children’s mental health needs.

Clinically, it has been complex keeping abreast of general practice. In the first 3 years after qualifying as a GP, I mainly locumed. The flexibility of this allowed me to also write medico-legal reports for victims of torture seeking asylum in the UK. I am currently coming to the end of a GP returner scheme as 4 years ago I was  unable to fulfil GP appraisal requirements (due to commitments in India initially and then two periods of maternity leave). A further asset of this ACL post is it provides a stable clinical job which avoids the pressure of finding locum work alongside academic commitments.