Abstract
The knowledge, skills and attitudes appropriate to general practice are concerned with clinical medicine and disease processes modified by consideration of human development and human behaviour. These considerations also determine to a greater extent than in hospital the manner in which therapy is prescribed and patients managed.
General practice however is concerned not only with patients and their families, but with a practice population and with the organisation of primary, continuing and long-term medical care. Within this framework the general practitioner deploys skills necessary to gather information on an extended scale; to form personal relationships; to identify problems; to initiate solutions and to order appropriate priorities. In making his decisions he must learn to be clinically effective although using scientifically inadequate data.
While general practice has progressed from the empirical and intuitive philosophy summed up in the oft-repeated ‘general practice isn't something you can teach, my boy, it has to be learned by years of experience !’ there is still sufficient truth in that saying to stimulate further effort to clarify our thinking and define our educational objectives.
In this way it is intended that the doctor of the future, better equipped and better trained, will meet more fully the needs of his patients and society.
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