Clinical practice guideline (CPG) activities must be planned carefully for efficient use of available resources and evidence-based implementation. De novo development of CPGs may sometimes 'recreate the wheel' and delay implementation. Three innovative alternatives to de novo CPG development (adopt, contextualise or adapt) are outlined, which have greater potential than de novo development to b...

"Building Your Own Future: an Agenda for General Practice" is a strategy document currently being sent by the General Medical Services Committee to all general practitioners in Britain. It raises a series ofquestions about what general practice should be and how it should be organised andfunded, and the committee wants the issues debated as widely as possible. We have commissioned seven article...

General practice secondments are being increasingly undertaken by specialist registrars in accident and emergency (A&E) medicine. This paper describes how two A&E trainees arranged general practice secondments and the experiences gained. There follows a discussion of the benefits to the general practice and trainees involved, together with a contemporary consideration of the interaction between...

BACKGROUND It is current UK policy to expand the numbers of newly qualified doctors entering training to become GPs, to meet increased demand. AIM To report on trends in young doctors' views on the attractiveness of general practice as a career, compared with hospital practice. DESIGN AND SETTING Questionnaire surveys in the UK. METHOD Surveys of doctors, 3 years after graduation, conduct...

BACKGROUND Recent years have seen an increasing corporatization of general practice. OBJECTIVE This paper considers how divisions of general practice should respond to the corporatization of general practice. DISCUSSION Corporate models are an economically rational outcome of structural features of Medicare funding for Australian general practice. One limitation of these structures is that ...

BACKGROUND Postgraduate training in general practice aims to develop clinical competence. However, little is known about its effect on trainees' development of clinical skills. AIM To assess the acquisition of clinical skills during a 3-year training programme and to evaluate whether a satisfactory level is achieved towards the end of training. DESIGN OF STUDY Cross-sectional design. SETT...

We describe our experience of planning and running a workshop in Sri Lanka to prepare doctors for teaching a postgraduate diploma in general practice. We explore whether British models of education for general practice are applicable in other cultures and put forward a check-list of questions which teachers of general practice who are invited to work abroad should ask themselves.

Humanitarian professionals continue to seek best practice guidelines for famine relief. Many emergency interventions in developing countries draw on recent lessons from the 20 century, but attention has also been paid to historical experiences such as the 19 century evolution of India’s Famine Codes and responses to Ireland’s famine of the 1840s. This article goes further back in time to examin...

This study examines the spatial distribution of general practice in London, taking into account both practice and population characteristics. While need for general practice is higher in inner London, some areas of outer London experience high levels of need. Inner London tends to have a greater quantity but lower quality of general practice. However, as in the case of the needs indices, this s...