TY - JOUR T1 - Academic primary care: at a tipping point? JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 214 LP - 215 DO - 10.3399/bjgp14X679543 VL - 64 IS - 622 AU - FD Richard Hobbs AU - Clare J Taylor Y1 - 2014/05/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/64/622/214.abstract N2 - Academic primary care in the UK has come of age. In terms of research, in 2008, the costly national Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) ranked the top research outputs from the premier UK centres of academic primary care (APC) as mainly ‘world leading’ or ‘world influencing’. For undergraduate teaching, all UK universities are critically dependent on APC staff for community-based teaching, and often communication training, behavioural science teaching, and much else. The role of traditional APC is less involved with postgraduate training in the UK, but a key academic training role has emerged.So why the question in the title — because tipping implies risk of slipping back as much as forward — if APC teaching is so embedded in medical schools and the research so influential in changing clinical guidelines on better disease management,1,2 and, promoting innovation in self-management,3–5 risk assessment,6,7 and diagnosis? 8–10 The tipping point is now one of capacity, whereas for most of the past 30 years it has been on quality.Within the UK there has been significant investment in APC since the mid-1990s, from the NHS via Service Increment for Teaching (SIFT) and ‘Tasked’ academic post funding, from … ER -