Five year GP training could bring partnership model back to life, says new RCGP chair

Kamila Hawthorne’s first encounter with the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) was not a positive one.

“I had done my MRCGP exams and I hated them, actually. I had the old fashioned, oral exam where I felt thoroughly patronised by the examiners. I remember stomping across Hyde Park thinking, ‘I’m never going back there again,’” she says, speaking to The BMJ before officially taking on her new role as RCGP chair on 21 November. “And now look—it’s amazing how things change.”

After receiving an RCGP research training fellowship in 1991, she decided to give the college another chance, and 30 years later she’s now more invested than ever.

“I want the college to be even more welcoming and inclusive than it currently is. We have a real diversity of members and not everybody feels that they belong,” Hawthorne says. “As a South Asian doctor—despite the British name and the British accent—I’ve come across my fair share of inequality and injustice. But I did feel it was better to work from inside rather than from outside.”

That idea led Hawthorne to stand for chair back in 2019, when she was beaten by Martin Marshall—a defeat that led to some self-doubt. She decided, however, to run again in 2022. “Over the three years, I think the whole climate has changed. The Black Lives Matter movement has made a big difference to the way people think about inclusivity and about diversity—not just for race, but other aspects of diversity as well,” she says.

Hawthorne and her family moved to the UK from Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, in 1970. She went on to …