A brief history of the BAGP

The full story

The late 1990s

Consultant numbers were growing, but many new posts were sub-specialist roles in tertiary centres. Those centres struggled to maintain general paediatric services, and secondary care patients admitted under tertiary specialists blocked access for children referred from district general hospitals.

District hospitals were thinly staffed at consultant level. Dr Thomson’s own hospital, serving around 250,000 people, gained its third consultant in 1990 and its fourth in 1996. The “decline” of General Paediatrics was widely discussed, overlooking the fact that about half of consultant paediatricians worked in DGHs, mostly as generalists.

Redressing the balance

A group of General Paediatricians set out to correct this. The RCPCH Academic Board let them host three sessions at the 2002 Spring Meeting. They received 67 abstracts and selected 20 to present, and four of the 24 abstracts chosen for RCPCH plenary sessions came from the group, second only to perinatal medicine.

The first meeting

On Thursday 18 April 2002, about 20 General Paediatricians met in Central Hall at the University of York. Dr Andrew Boon of Reading, the convenor, proposed a formal body to promote interest and research in General Paediatrics, and the meeting agreed. A draft constitution followed, and some members sent cheques before a subscription had even been set.

Ideas from that first meeting included a website, an autumn meeting, and links with primary care, the RCGP, the Royal Colleges of Physicians of Edinburgh and Glasgow, and the Royal Society of Medicine.