Society for Social Medicine 55th Annual Scientific Meeting

Ramphal Building, University of Warwick 14th-16th September 2011

Conference Report 2011

This year’s conference - the 55th Annual Scientific meeting of the Society was a great success. It was held at the University of Warwick from September 14th-16th in the Ramphal building on some lovely sunny September days.

For many of us the Annual Scientific Meeting is one of the highlights of the academic year - a conference where the best methodology is coupled with the latest health services and public health research in a friendly atmosphere - and this year was no exception.

Our Vice Chancellor Professor Nigel Thrift and our Warwick Medical School Dean Professor Peter Winstanley both gave most appropriate and energising talks to us, and on the Thursday evening the conference dinner in the Assembly Rooms of the Royal Pump Room in Leamington Spa was delicious. Workshops and trips e.g. to Compton Verney www.comptonverney.org.uk/ were widely enjoyed. The Stanley Spencer exhibition at Compton Verney was spectacular, as were the beautiful Capability Brown grounds. Those who got lost on the walk around Kenilworth were all found again in time for the dinner!

Guest Speakers and Scientific Highlights

This year our guest speakers were Professor Debbie Lawlor, Head of Division of Epidemiology, Department of Social Medicine, University of Bristol who gave the Pemberton lecture. Debbie is famous for her work on understanding how biological (including genetic), social and environmental exposures from across the life course affect the risk of chronic disease in adulthood. She talked about intergenerational transmission of obesity and glucose intolerance and changed my thinking about phenotype and genotype and their relative roles.

Professor Peter Groenewegen, Director of NIVEL –the national institute for health services research in the Netherlands who has published extensively on health services research in primary care, help seeking behaviour, strengthening Public Health Research in Europe and screening, consultation rates and length of hospital stay gave the Cochrane lecture. He spoke about “strong” and “weak” primary care systems and made me wonder why the current NHS reforms appear to be bent on “weakening” our famously “strong” primary care system.

Other highlights of the scientific programme included Professor Sarah Stewart Brown talking about WEMWBS - the Warwick Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale; Yvonne Doyle speaking on “Time for Bed” the links between school children’s bedtime and measure of their health and wellbeing and an interesting plenary presented by a prize winning early career researcher on “Understanding Mental health dynamics for older adults. ”

We were delighted to extend our warm welcome to you to Warwick for the 55th Annual Scientific Meeting of the Society for Social Medicine. Now we’ve done it – we want to do it all again

Aileen Clarke

For the Warwick Medical School Conference Organising Committee

Visit the Society for Social Medicine website here: www.socsocmed.org.uk