The laws of primary care
I have long suspected that the essence of primary care can be boiled down to universal principles, ‘laws’ if you will. Here are mine:
The First Law of Primary Care is that every person should have an allocated clinician. Don’t take my word for this and, if in doubt, turn to Iona Heath. It has been a decade since she wrote her 2008 BMJ article ‘A general practitioner for every person in the world’, in which she made the case that GPs are not simply a luxury for the most privileged nations.1 I would add two important sub-clauses: first, there should be a limit on the number of patients allocated to the clinician; second, patients should have reasonable access to the clinician and …