John Aloizos is a part-time GP in Brisbane and is currently Chairman of the Australian Pharmaceutical Advisory Council, and a member of the Australian Health Information Council, where he Chairs the Electronic Decision Support Steering Committee. He is a former member of the General Practice Computing Group Management Committee and the General Practice Partnership Advisory Council. He was the i...

The opportunities for significant research in general practice are nearly unlimited. All that is required is an open mind, normal powers of seeing, and confidence in the accuracy of our observations. Very little is known about the significance of symptoms, and nearly every patient will provide data of some sort provided he is listened to and observed with interest and sympathy. Many of us erron...

The American Association of Physicists in Medicine (AAPM) is a nonprofit professional society whose primary purposes are to advance the science, education, and professional practice of medical physics. The AAPM has more than 8,000 members and is the principal organization of medical physicists in the United States. The AAPM will periodically define new practice guidelines for medical physics pr...

BACKGROUND Patient engagement in clinical practice guideline (CPG) development is recommended by multiple institutions and instruments measuring guideline quality. Approaches to engaging patients, however, vary between oversight organizations, quality tools and guideline developers. OBJECTIVE We propose a ten-step framework outlining steps and options for patient engagement in guideline devel...

BACKGROUND Health care is increasingly provided in general practice. To meet this demand, the English Department of Health recommends that 50% of all medical students should train for general practice after qualification. Currently 19% of medical students express general practice as their first career choice. Undergraduate exposure to general practice positively influences future career choice....

As the evidence for oncology nursing practice expands exponentially, nurse clinicians, including oncology nurses, are faced with a growing demand to integrate evolving contemporary evidence into practice. Models such as the Evidence-Based Practice (EBP) Framework (University of Pennsylvania Health System [UPHS] Nursing Research Committee, 1999) (see Figure 1), as well as the Oncology Nursing So...

DESPITE the exciting developments in electronic communication most doctors still learn by reading; the convenience of the printed text and the flexibility it allows in deciding where and when it can be used means that, at least for the next few years, books and journals will remain the principal source of information for practising clinicians. The literature of general practice is relatively ne...

BACKGROUND The administrative and professional consequences of access targets for general practices, as detailed in the new GMS contract, are unknown. This study researched the effect of implementing the access targets of the new GP contract on general practice appointment systems, and practice manager satisfaction in a UK primary health care setting. METHODS A four-part postal questionnaire ...

BACKGROUND An accurate diabetes register enables a general practice to effectively monitor and manage the services for their patients with diabetes. This pilot project builds on the National Primary Care Collaboratives Program (a quality improvement programme for general practice) as the first change principle for managing chronic diseases. OBJECTIVES The main aim of the project was to improv...

The traditional bioethical approach to addressing clinical ethical dilemmas is to apply ethical principles to analyse the dilemma to reach an ethically acceptable course of action. This paper will address the problem of what to do when the patient or patient’s proxy disagree with this advice. I will argue that ethical principles have limitations in a culturally diverse world, and that best prac...