I really appreciated the Back Pages paper on academic general practice.1 It emphasises not only the history but the importance of academic general practice. John Howie warns that the increase in renaming general practice as primary care could mean that general practice may not be a GP-led service in the future. Also, I would strongly underline what Howie writes, ‘academic general practice has contributed significantly to the evolving understanding of the relationships between medicine and society’.
I think that this understanding is a key political point to spread worldwide of the importance of teaching in undergraduate academic general practice. National and international GP organisations should help political developments in other countries, at least the European ones.
Howie mentioned some international organisations also naming the Leeuwenhorst Group. This became EURACT (European Academy of Teachers of Family Medicine). EURACT is really the most active network (and academy with a legal body) in the WONCA context. During these years EURACT worked with national representatives from 40 different European countries to write key basilar documents for family medicine.2 They are: the European Definition, the EURACT Educational Agenda, the EURACT Performance Agenda, the Statement on Selection of Teachers and Practices, and the Checklist for Course Organizers. EURACT Educational Agenda, with its core competences, describes the content and the way for teaching and learning in a general practice context so effectively that it was used by the RCGP in its official documents and is used in other European countries. This is not the same in all countries and I think it is a duty for the strong national and international academies and organisations of family medicine to spread academic general practice in each country with the obvious positive consequences on family medicine and the population.3,4,5
As the EURACT Basic Medical Education Committee, we are now at the point of publishing some research, based on the Delphi process, a minimal teaching core curriculum in general practice which will hopefully be useful in introducing a minimal homogeneity in programmes, but mainly to help less established countries open general practice departments and courses for all the students in medicine.6
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2010.
