Family Medicine becomes separate department
In 1988, the Department of Family Medicine at KI was established, with Hans Åberg as Director and Lead Professor. For a time, Family Medicine was part of the Department of Clinical Science, Intervention and Technology. It was not until 2005 that the department became part of NVS and today is referred to as the Division of Family Medicine and Primary Care.
Since its inception, research in general medicine has spanned many areas and reflected the complex structure of primary care. The research is clinical, close to the patient, epidemiological and health science. Knowledge is developed about everything from osteoporosis, asthma care, coronary artery disease, diabetes, physical activity, gastrointestinal problems and psychological problems to how to successfully communicate with patients, and various decision support structures in care.
Migration medicine as a specialisation
When Hans Åberg was succeeded by Jan Sundquist as Head of General Medicine, the research increasingly focused on migration medicine. An example of this is Per Wändell’s research on diabetes in relation to socio-economic factors such as migration.
Wändell, Professor of General Medicine, was one of the first PhD students at the Department of General Medicine. For a period he divided his time between a position as a district doctor and a lecturer at KI.
His research dealt with areas such as disease patterns in different immigrant groups, treatment efficacy, and how care can best reach patients to implement preventive measures. He has also conducted studies of high blood pressure, heart failure and atrial fibrillation as well as studies of physical activity as part of primary care treatment.
For a time, he was also Director of Studies at the Department’s research school, which was run in collaboration with Region Stockholm.
Wändell was also on the National Board of Health and Welfare’s fact-finding group when drawing up national guidelines for diabetes.
Close co-operation with Region Stockholm
The Center for General Medicine, CeFAM, was established in 2003 as a collaboration between the then Stockholm County Council and KI. CeFAM became the largest development, training and research centre in general medicine in Sweden and among the largest in Europe. The operational manager for the Department of General Medicine and CeFAM was Jan Sundqvist.
The collaboration between CeFAM and the Department of General Medicine was more or less seamless for some time. At most, several hundred simultaneous research and development projects were run here in a number of areas, including diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, cancer and heredity conditions, mental illness, physical activity and gastrointestinal diseases.
In 2008, Sundquist left KI and CeFAM to start a centre for research in primary care: the Center for Primary Care Research within the framework of Region Skåne and Lund University. Today, the centre is run by Kristina Sundquist, also a former professor at the Department of General Medicine at NVS.
The successor to CeFAM became the Academic Primary Care Center, which was formed in 2015 through the merger of the Center for General Medicine and the network of academic care centres.
Gunnar Nilsson, Professor of General Medicine, specialising in Medical Informatics, was Operational Director at CeFAM for a time. He was also among the first doctoral students at the Department of General Medicine. Just two years after his defence, he became Associate Professor and lecturer in General Medicine.
Between 2005 and 2007, he was heavily involved in developing the new medical training and later became Programme Director for the medical programme. In 2013, he received KI’s teaching prize for his “decisive role in the work of organising, developing, implementing and evaluating the new medical programme at KI”.
Nilsson has conducted broad-based research in the field of medical informatics and cultivated a clinical focus on systems sciences. He participated at an early stage in the development of electronic patient records and for a time held a parallel position at Stockholm University.
As a researcher, he is best described as a generalist and has conducted clinical research in cardiovascular diseases, mental illness and epidemiology. In the pedagogical field, he has researched the learning environment in primary care when it became a component of the new medical training.
“As a researcher who has moved between a handful of research fields, where I have covered the entire chain from individual to society, I feel very much at home at NVS. Virtually all clinical professions are represented here. We’re a mini-university in many ways. We need to see an increase in clinical research in primary care. And today there is a momentum at the national level that has identified a need to strengthen primary care both academically and clinically.”
In 2014, he spent six months on a sabbatical at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) in Singapore. He brought home a more international approach to research and teaching and brought insights into team-based learning to KI.
There are currently around 70 researchers and doctoral students at the Department of General Medicine and Primary Care. Research is largely financed via the so-called ALF agreement with Region Stockholm.
The research groups focus mainly on the four areas of medical pedagogy, health care with social work, mental illness and long-term illnesses.
TEXT: Magnus Trogen Pahlén