TUTOR-PHC 2026 Research Symposium | Out of the research silo, into a global primary care village

I am an NIHR Clinical Lecturer in Primary Care at Keele University and a GP in inner-city Manchester. My research focuses on mental health inequalities in underserved communities, with a particular interest in culture and mental health and approaches that tackle systemic barriers to care. I recently returned from the four-day in-person symposium of TUTOR-PHC, being privileged to be part of the 2026/2027 cohort.

TUTOR-PHC (Transdisciplinary Understanding and Training on Research – Primary Health Care) is a year-long interdisciplinary training programme based at Western University. It opened with a four-day in-person symposium at the Spencer Hotel and Conference Centre, followed by online workshops in June and November, asynchronous interdisciplinary discussion groups across the autumn and winter, and a mock grant proposal written collaboratively in the new year. The programme has been training and connecting primary health care researchers across Canada and beyond for over two decades, and you can feel that depth in every session.

A view from the plane when landing in Toronto…

Arrival, and a taxi that set the tone

A wonderful start was sharing a taxi from the airport with Dr Vivian Ramsden and Brenda Andreas. Viv is an embodiment of servant leadership. Distinguished Professor at the University of Saskatchewan, Past-President of the North American Primary Care Research Group (NAPCRG), and decades of participatory research alongside Indigenous communities in northern Saskatchewan and South India. She is living evidence that humility, giving voice to underserved communities and treating every person at the table as a partner, does not stop you from being highly successful. Brenda, a social worker by background and one of our cohort, brought the heart of patient oriented research through her lived experience and her work putting the patient voice at the heart of any research question.

Before the symposium: the Western visit

Before the symposium started in the evening, I took the daytime opportunity to visit Western's Nursing Research Committee at the Arthur Labatt Family School of Nursing and present my ideas around culturally safe mental health care and where our research interests might meet. It was great to meet leaders in the field (although I was slightly embarrassed asking someone’s name and then realising she’s the one whose seminal paper I had just quoted J). I enjoyed walking past the hordes of geese on the beautiful Western campus, although I kept a distance as I was warned it is mating season and they can be ready for a fight!

My newfound artistry!

The symposium began with everyone drawing posters of our research and introducing ourselves to each other through the posters and looking for areas of similarity and difference. The thought of drawing was unimaginable to me… until I started! Even better than that was connecting with wonderful mentors and mentees, each one of them an expert in their own right. Until then I had not realised I had an artistic side!!

A global village in one room

Twelve Canadian fellows and six international fellows. Sixteen mentors. Family physicians, nurses, nurse practitioners, social workers, pharmacists, decision makers and patient partners, from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, the Netherlands, Türkiye, and me from the UK. Dr Amanda Terry, Dr Judith Belle Brown and Dr Maxime Sasseville opened with a welcome that was warm, careful, and explicit about values. Develop relationships. Do not be worried about rephrasing. Daily check-ins. Land acknowledgement. Value and engage each other. A very inclusive and welcoming start!

Multi, inter and transdisciplinary

Dr Amanda Terry then walked us through the history and scope of primary health care: the Alma Ata Declaration of 1978, the Declaration of Astana of 2018, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research framing of community based primary health care, and a distinction between primary health care, broader and inclusive of the social determinants, and primary care, more individual.

Dr Judith Belle Brown highlighted the difference between multi, inter and transdisciplinary work. Multidisciplinary work is parallel, often hierarchical, and coordinated but independent. Interdisciplinary work integrates and synthesises across disciplines around shared goals. Transdisciplinary work builds a common knowledge base and a language that becomes unique to the team, with equality, overlap and a welcome for difference.

It reminded me of an Arabic phrase I hear from my mentor: Ikhtilaf al-tanawwu' laa ikhtilaf al-tadaadd, we should view diversity to enrich rather than to cause conflict. It captured what the room was modelling: fellows and mentors learning together, tolerating uncertainty, working towards shared goals.

The interdisciplinary discussion groups, facilitated across the week by Dr Rachelle Ashcroft, Dr Graham Reid, Dr Catherine Donnelly and Dr Maxime Sasseville, asked each of us to present our own project and to think about how the disciplinary perspectives of others would shape it. Hearing Veena Mudaliar on obesity care for South Asian patients in Vancouver, Alissia Hui's mixed methods PhD on long acting reversible contraception for endometriosis in Australia, Kim Arrowsmith's ethnographic work on rheumatic fever school based clinics in South Auckland, Zeenat Ladak's implementation work in maternal and integrated health and social care, Mariana Passos de Souza on bridging clinical practice and health policy in Brazil, and Brenda Andreas's community based work, sharpened my own thinking about culturally safe mental health support in underserved UK communities.

Methods, impact and grant writing

Dr Emily Gard Marshall opened on mixed methods, quoting Einstein: not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. Dr Vivian Ramsden, Mr Ron Beleno, Dr Erin Barker and Dr Adrian MacKenzie then led on integrated knowledge mobilisation and the impact narrative. Start with the so what. Bring decision makers and lived experience onto the team, and consider them for authorship. Combine the numbers with the story. As Viv put it, government wants the numbers, but without a story it does not hit; you need both, and ideally the story from a patient. Ron gave an example talking to policy maker, telling him if an AI scribe gives me two minutes more face to face time with a patient, that is a few more questions, and that is a big deal to me.

Dr Graham Reid and Dr Maria Mathews then walked us through grant generation. Develop a programme of research, not just a study. Assemble a team that can actually work together, which matters more than working with the world expert. Sell the idea up front. Nail the methods… good ideas often fail on methods. A reflection from myself - a rejected grant is a means of mercy, stopping something that would have fallen later, giving the opportunity to strengthen and develop it for when the time is right…

Patient and community partnership

A concluding session was the patient engagement workshop. Dr Rebecca Ganann, alongside patient partners Ron Beleno, Lois Letcher and Sandra MacKenzie, framed engagement not as a checkbox but as a relationship that evolves over time.

Ron's words stayed with me: patient partners are storytellers, and our job as researchers is to gather the data that helps their story. He described starting as the sole patient voice at AGE-WELL, then building a steering group, then a community of over 5,000. Talk about building a team! Talking about developing something that will outlast oneself! The question he asks every researcher is simple: what is in it for them? Lois spoke of her journey from caregiver to advocate, first as a driver to appointments, then as a voice when her husband's words could no longer carry his meaning. Sandra spoke of her decades as a public health nurse and her years caring for her late husband, and of honouring the primacy of the patient and their family. Dr Ramsden's point, that the research question should come from the community and that people own their data, anchored the morning.

 And a meal included lebanese lamb shoulder! Worth flying for!

Out of the silo

If I took one message from the four days, it is this. Primary care research cannot be done well in silos. Not in disciplinary silos. Not in institutional silos. And not in national silos. The problems we are trying to solve, whether that is access to mental health care for ethnic minority communities, integration of services for older people, or the management of endometriosis in primary care, all sit at the intersections. The TUTOR-PHC room was a small working model of what crossing those intersections actually looks like: a global village where family physicians, patient partners, social workers, nurses, pharmacists and decision makers sit as equals around the same problem, with mentors who have spent decades modelling how to do it well.

We all need to connect. Across our disciplines. Across the table from our patients and communities. And across countries, so that the work being done in Vancouver and Sherbrooke and Auckland and São Paulo and Groningen and Manchester can speak to each other rather than past each other.

Goals from here

The four-day symposium is the opening of the year, not the whole of it. I left Canada with two concrete goals.

First, to embed the transdisciplinary approach into my work and grant applications. How the team is assembled, how the research question is framed, and how decision makers and patient partners are involved from the start. Who’s got a different perspective that would enrich the project and our thinking?

Second, to keep in touch with the cohort and the mentors. We heard lots of stories of multiple collaborations including grants and papers from TUTOR mentors and mentees… let’s write our chapter in this storybook…

What's coming for the rest of the year

I am excited about the rest of the programme. Two online workshops in June to choose from. The November workshop on “Engaging Policy and Decision Makers in PHC”, which ends with a live elevator pitch session – a challenge that’s been highlighted in some of my work is the need for policy influence so I’m super keen for this one! Eight weeks of online interdisciplinary discussion groups from early September. Then another eight weeks in the new year, where the cohort writes a mock response to a Request for Proposals as a group, with each fellow taking responsibility for one section, before a panel of TUTOR mentors review it and give feedback.

It is a rigorous structure, and from what I have seen of the people in it, I’m excited to be a part of it!

With thanks

The NIHR School for Primary Care Research has invested in me to be here. To any UK primary care researcher considering applying in future, I would encourage you to. The cohort, the mentorship and the structured time to challenge ourselves to think transdisciplinarily are rare, and I’m hopeful of developing long-term collaborations in a global village that suddenly feels so much more interconnected.

Huge thanks to Dr Judith Belle Brown and Dr Amanda Terry for their leadership of TUTOR-PHC, and to Priya Garg for the organising that made every part of this feel seamless. I hope to live up to the investment by serving primary care research to the highest standard I can...