Like all specialties general practice waxes and wanes in popularity. In the 1980s, soon after mandatory vocational training for general practice was introduced, it was a very popular specialty only to decline in the 1990s. The advent of the 1990 contract for general practice was not well received by the profession and medical students learning in general practice frequently encountered GPs reluctantly striving to meet immunisation and cervical cytology targets.
At about the same time the ‘Calman reforms’ for specialist training were introduced, promising shortened training together with an expansion of the specialist workforce. The result was increased recruitment into most hospital specialties and a decline in the popularity of general practice training, so that by 1995 only 18% of a graduate cohort study group had decided on a career in general practice.1
During the last decade considerable effort has been made to improve the quality of community-based learning for undergraduates and this, together with the realisation that general practice offered better career prospects compared to many hospital specialties, resulted in an increase to 33% from the same group of graduates deciding on a career in general practice by 2004.1
The importance of strong general practice is recognised in the new White Paper: Our health, our care, our say: a new direction for community services',2 in which it is envisioned that …