General Practitioners are specialists
We believe that General Practice is a Speciality. It appears rather contradictory to say that a generalist is a specialist, but we believe that the special skills that a GP must develop constitute a discipline equal (or superior) to other medical specialities.
The following is a BMJ leader on the topic:
The specialist of the discipline of general practice
Over the past 50 years general practice has established itself not only as an academic discipline with its own curriculum, research base, and peer reviewed journals but also as the cornerstone of most national healthcare systems in Europe.
In so doing, general practitioners have shown that the intellectual framework within which they operate is different from, but no less demanding than that of specialists.
General practitioners must achieve a working diagnostic and therapeutic knowledge across the reach of biomedical science and must be able to forge effective and continuing relationships with an enormous range of individual patients.
They need to understand the processes by which illness is socially constructed within the patient's life, and they must mediate between the patient's subjective experience of illness and the scientific explanation.
The breadth and comprehensiveness of its endeavour has made general practice notoriously difficult to define.
Olesen et al attempted a new definition that emphasises the frontline nature of the care offered and the need to incorporate psychological and sociological perspectives alongside biomedical ones.
| Suggested new definition of general practice
The general practitioner is a specialist trained to work in the front line of a healthcare system and to take the initial steps to provide care for any health problem(s) that patients may have. The general practitioner takes care of individuals in a society, irrespective of the patient's type of disease or other personal and social characteristics, and organises the resources available in the healthcare system to the best advantage of the patients. The general practitioner engages with autonomous individuals across the fields of prevention, diagnosis, cure, care, and palliation, using and integrating the sciences of biomedicine, medical psychology, and medical sociology. |
Sources:
Heath, I., Evans, P., van Weel, C. (2000). The specialist of the discipline
of general practice. BMJ 320: 326-327
Olesen F, Dickinson J, Hjortdahl P. General practice: time for a new definition. BMJ 2000; 320: 354-357 [Full Text]
