Prof Kamila Hawthorne MBE
(UK)
Calman lecturer
Chair
Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP)
Calman lecture
“Differential Attainment: Stuck between a rock and a hard place, the devil is in the detail“
Prof Hawthorne has experience as an academic medical educator, and as a senior examiner for the MRCGP exams, particularly the Clinical Skills Assessment (CSA) that has now been replaced by the Simulated Clinical Assessment (SCA). As such, she has lived through the experience of the Judicial Review brought against the RCGP and GMC alleging racism, and been a lead investigator in a socio-linguistic research project looking at CSA recorded cases in detail for reasons why some candidates do less well than others.
Biography
Kamila has been a GP for 34 years, with 27 of them spent working in South Wales. She qualified from Somerville College, Oxford, in 1984, and completed her GP training in Nottingham in 1988. Kamila is currently Chair of RCGP Council, having taken up office in November 2022. She was Head of the Graduate Entry Medicine Programme at Swansea University and is on the Trustee Boards of the Kings Fund, and Cardiff Women’s Aid. She is also a Bevan Commissioner and a Fellow of the Learned Society of Wales.
Kamila has a deep interest in medical education, and believes that we should be training excellent, caring and inclusive clinicians, for a global society. She is passionate about the role of GPs in patient care and as advocates for patients.
Her research and clinical working interests have been in health inequalities and access to health services, (her MD was based on working with BAME patient groups with Type 2 diabetes in Nottingham, Manchester and Cardiff). With wide experience of general practice and running community projects in diabetes and heart disease, she has been named ‘GP of the Year’ twice and was awarded an MBE in 2017 for services to General Practice.