Around one million GP consultations happen in NHS England every working day, addressing multiple problems. Despite this, studies of what goes on during these encounters are uncommon. The One in a Million archive is a unique dataset of high quality video-recordings and verbatim transcripts of routine GP consultations with consent for reuse in research and education. One in a Million data collection was funded by the NIHR School for Primary Care Research and the South-West GP Trust. The archive is a legacy of this study.

The archive was collected to support researchers wishing to work with naturalistic data. There are many challenges associated with collecting this kind of data, for example, minimising disruption to patient flow. By working with existing data, clinician and patient burden is reduced alongside research cost. The videos were collected from 327 unselected adult patients consulting with 23 GPs in 12 different general practices within the City of Bristol area between July 2014 and April 2015. 300 of these consented for their videos to be held in an archive to be reused by researchers with ethical approval to access the data. In addition, 299 consented for their videos to be used for training by approved researchers and university teachers for the development of medical and research training materials.

Due to the sensitive nature of the data, access is to the archive restricted.  The One in a Million team were in the very early stages of curating this archive and are now looking at ways to develop it further.  They were interested in exploring how it can be used in research outside of the primary care community, and to engage with the public.

What did the project involve? 

1) Developing an international network of primary care consultation archives

There are other archives of video recordings of primary care consultations held in various counties worldwide. The team undertook scoping work to identify other archives and to learn about their collections. They also strengthened relationships with other UK researchers who are planning to develop their own archive of GP consultations and explored whether it is possible for the archives to be linked.

2) Developing a forum for sharing cross disciplinary good practice, within the University

The team identified other  archives of qualitative data within the University and explored links with these groups in order to share best practice and support.

3) Exploring the potential for cross disciplinary collaborative research using the archive

The research team held a workshop with researchers from across the faculties to explore opportunities to extend the archives use outside the boundaries of primary health care.

Who are the team and what do they bring?

• Rebecca Barnes (Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol ) has expertise in applied conversation analysis and is the Data Steward for “One in a Million Archive”
• Barbara Caddick (Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol) is an Academic Administrator, Support officer One in a Million Archive  and Network Facilitator Department of History, School of Humanities
• Christopher Salisbury (Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol)
• Matthew Ridd (Bristol Medical School, University of Bristol)