MedicsVoices

Glenn Colquhoun is a GP, poet, and children's writer. His first collection The art of walking upright won the Jessie Mackay best first book of poetry award at the 2000 Montana book awards. Playing God, his third collection, won the poetry section of the same awards in 2003 as well as the reader's choice award that year. He was awarded the Prize in modern letters in 2004 and a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard University in 2010. In 2012 he was part of the ‘Transit of Venus’ poetry exchange at the Frankfurt book fair and in 2014 represented New Zealand on the Commonwealth Poets United poetry project which celebrated the Glasgow Commonwealth Games that year. His latest collection of poetry The Ballad of Joe Taihape was published in 2026. He works as a GP in Horowhenua.

Robert F Woollard is Emeritus Professor of Family Practice at the University of British Columbia. He has extensive national and international experience in the fields of medical education, social accountability of medical schools, ecosystem approaches to health, and sustainable development.In this he has or is holding leadership roles in the CFPC, CMA, AFMC, AMEE, and The Network TUFH. He is actively involved in Nepal with a national medical school, school of public health and a nursing school founded on the principles of social accountability established through his initial feasibility study. He Chairs the International Advisory Board (IAB) for the newly established University of Nepal (Dec. 2024) a new public liberal arts university. His work in East Africa and Asia is centered on matters of social accountability, primary care, rural health and accreditation systems.Dr. Woollard co-chairs the Global Consensus on Social Accountability for Medical Schools (GCSA) and does extensive work in this area with many international bodies. He was a lead organizer for the World Summit on Social Accountability that led to the Tunis Declaration and recently chaired the Scientific Committee for TUFH2022 the annual conference of this network devoted to social justice and health, leading to the declaration https://thenetworktufh.org/tufh-2022- declaration/He has engaged in a range of grant supported work including the establishment of CoPEH-Canada and the five year ECHO project on watershed scale integration of environmental, community and health. As an Associate Director of the Rural Coordination Centre of BC (RCCbc) he provided central leadership in the development of a Canadian national strategy for addressing educational and service needs for surgical and obstetrical services in rural Canada in particular Aboriginal service access for birthing. And, has worked in many areas to reduce racism in BC’s health system. Above all he is a husband, father, and grandfather.

Tim Stokes is the Elaine Gurr Professor of General Practice at the Department of Primary Care, Otago School of Medicine, based at the Dunedin campus, New Zealand.He is an academic general practitioner with a particular interest in health care delivery and implementation research, using a range of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. His particular interests are in rural health services and health systems, evaluating complex health system interventions, and new ways of delivering health services for acute and chronic clinical conditions in primary care and across the primary/community – secondary care interface He was a member of NZ’s Pharmaceutical Management Agency (PHARMAC) Pharmacology and Therapeutics Advisory Group (PTAC) from 2016 to 2022. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Primary Health Care, and Past President, Australasian Association for Academic Primary Care (AAAPC)He was previously Senior Clinical Lecturer in Primary Care, University of Birmingham 2013–2014; Consultant Clinical Adviser, National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), a Visiting Professor at the Universities of Leicester and Leeds 2006–2013, and Lecturer / Senior Lecturer in General Practice, University of Leicester, UK 1997–2006.

Jim Dickinson is a Family Physician and Professor at the Department of Family Medicien at the University of Calgary. After medical training from Queensland University, Australia, he trained in Family Medicine at McMaster University, Canada, then a Kellogg Fellowship at McGill University in Canada. He returned to Australia and wrote his PhD on Preventive Activities in General Practice, while working in General Practice and as a Fellow at Newcastle University. Subsequently he was the first advisor in General Practice to the Australian Department of Health in Canberra, then held chairs in the University of Western Australia and Chinese University of Hong Kong. He returned to Canada in 2002, and been at the University of Calgary since then, He has had a long-term interest in prevention and screening, and has contributed to provincial and national screening program committees, and was appointed to the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care from 2009 to 2016. He runs the Alberta sentinel practice program for surveillance of respiratory virus disease in the Alberta community, the TARRANT program. He also researches antibiotic use in community practice and writes about health care policy.

Professor Ngaire Kerse is the Joyce Cook Chair in Ageing Well and a Professor of General Practice and Primary Health Care at the University of Auckland. She is a practicing GP at the Auckland City Mission. Since 2010 she has been co-principal investigator of a longitudinal study – Life and Living in Advanced Age: a Cohort Study in New Zealand (LiLACs NZ). She was listed in the New Year’s Honours as a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit. After training in primary care in New Zealand, Australia, and the USA, completing a Geriatric Medicine Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD at the University of Melbourne, she has built a programme of research promoting activity and function in residential care, residential care organisational culture and outcomes, promoting physical activity in community dwelling older people, activity for depression in the very old, staying upright (preventing falls and injury) in older people in all settings, improving prescribing in primary care, and a large cohort of Māori and non-Māori in advanced age.

Liz Darlinson is a Consultant Nurse and the CEO of Mesothelioma UK, a national charity dedicated to supporting people living with, or supporting those with, mesothelioma and advancing research in this field. In 2004, Liz founded Mesothelioma UK. Mesothelioma UK | Supporting people with this asbestos cancer. She was appointed MBE in the 2019 Queen’s Birthday Honours, and became Deputy Lieutenant for Leicestershire in 2024, in recognition of her professional contributions to the community.She combines over 40 years of hands-on clinical practice with charity management, education, and clinical research to improve patient outcomes and raise public awareness of this rare, devastating disease. A Consultant Nurse in the University Hospitals of Leicester NHS Trust, she also holds an Honorary Senior Lecturer position at De Montfort University, the University of Leicester. She is a founding member of the International Thoracic Oncology Nurses Forum, a lifetime honorary member of Lung Cancer Nursing UK, and the first nursing board member of the International Mesothelioma Interest Group.

Professor Philip Evans FRCGP is an academic GP and was for 31 years a GP partner in St Leonard’s Practice, Exeter. He has a long-standing research interest in relational continuity of care in general practice, as well as prediabetes/ type 2 diabetes and more recently primary care genomics.He is currently National Associate Director of Health and Care Research in the NIHR Research Delivery Network (RDN) and was previously the NIHR CRN National Specialty Lead for Primary Care. During the COVID-19 pandemic he was Deputy Chair of the NIHR Urgent Public Health (UPH) Group and has recently led the CRN engagement with the four-nation PRINCIPLE and PANORAMIC studies of community-based treatment of COVID-19. He has over 28 years’ experience of leading primary care research networks, both locally and nationally. For the last four years he has been leading the NIHR CRN Primary care Research Strategy.

Minna Johansson is a general practitioner working clinically at Herrestads healthcare centre a healthcare centre in Uddevalla, a small town on the Swedish west coast. She is an Associate Professor at Gothenburg University, director of Cochrane Sustainable Healthcare.She is the lead investigator of the Global Center for Sustainable Healthcare, focused on finding novel ways to make healthcare more sustainable for patients, clinicians, health systems, societies, and for our planet. Minna feels just as passionate about her clinical work as she does about her research. “My goal is to contribute to a more sustainable healthcare through research inspired by the problems me and my patients face in clinical practice.”Her PhD in 2018 was titled "Evaluating benefits and harms of screening - the streetlight effect?". Her research interests include methodological aspects of evaluating benefits and harms of screening when up-to-date data from randomized trials is lacking, informed choice/shared decision making, overdiagnosis/medicalization and how values and context can be integrated in evidence-based medicine.

Louise Dubras, Professor Emeritus, led the creation of a new GP focused Graduate Entry Medical School, at Ulster University. She joined Ulster University as Foundation Dean of the new medical school in 2018, developed the curriculum, put together the educational team, and the first cohort of medical students graduated in 2025. During this time she continued to work as a general practitioner one day each week, and immersed herself in the local community. She was born and grew up in Jersey in the Channel Islands. She was lead GP for a homeless service. addiction and mental illness in Southampton where her increasing involvement with the University of Southampton led to her running the medical degree programme. She became Deputy Dean of Medical Education King’s College GKT homas’s medical school in London at a time of huge curriculum change and later became Interim Dean of Medical Education. She was recognised by the award of MBE in the King's Birthday Honours in 2025.

Dr. Christopher Labos is a cardiologist, a course lecturer in the Department of Epidemiology, Biostatistics and Occupational Health at McGill University and an affiliate member of the Department of Global and Public Health. He is a columnist with the Montreal Gazette and Medscape, featured on the Sunday Morning House Call on CJAD radio, and has a regular TV segment with CTV Montreal and CBC Morning Live. He blogs and produces a video series called “On Second Thought” for Medscape. He is an associate with the McGill Office of Science and Society and hosts the award-winning podcast “The Body of Evidence.” He is the author of “Does Coffee Cause Cancer?” a story about food epidemiology and why food headlines are usually wrong. He realizes that half of his research findings will be disproved in five years: he just doesn’t know which half. Occasionally, he finds time to practice as a cardiologist so he can buy groceries. To date no one has offered him his own primetime TV show.

Carolyn Chew-Graham is a General Practitioner and Professor of General Practice Research at Keele University. Her areas of interest and expertise include the primary care (including in prisons) management of people with mental health problems, multiple health conditions and unexplained symptoms, and the mental health and wellbeing of clinicians.Patient and Public Involvement is key to all her research. She chairs the RCGP ‘Research Paper of the Year’ panel. Carolyn was awarded an OBE for services to general practice and primary care research, including research into Long Covid, in the King’s Inaugural Birthday Honours List, June 2023. Carolyn is an NIHR Senior Investigator.

Dr Jean-Frédéric Levesque is the Chief Executive of the NSW Agency for Clinical Innovation, and the Deputy Secretary, Clinical Innovation and Research at the NSW Ministry of Health. Jean-Frédéric is an Adjunct Professor at the Centre for Primary Health Care and Equity at the University of New South Wales. He has authored more than 160 peer reviewed publications and his seminal research on healthcare access and inequity has been cited more than 3,000 times. Jean-Frédéric Levesque has a Medical Degree, a Masters in Community Health and a Doctorate in Public Health from the Université de Montréal, Canada. He brings extensive leadership in healthcare systems analysis and improvement, combining experience in clinical practice in refugee health and tropical medicine, in clinical governance and in academic research.

Professor Igor Švab. First Head of the Department of Family Medicine and current Dean of the Medical Faculty, University of Ljubljana. He graduated in 1981, Masters in 1988, and PhD in 1991 at the University of Ljubljana. President of the European Association of Family Physicians WONCA Europe 2004-2010. He is coordinator of national and international research projects and World Bank projects in the field of family medicine. Editor-in-chief of the Slovenian Journal of Public Health, Editor of the European Journal of General Practice, Member of Slovenian and Croatian Academy of Medical Sciences, honorary member of the Royal College of General Practitioners (UK) and recipient of the title of WONCA World Fellow. He published more than 100 scientific and professional articles in MEDLINE.