TY - JOUR T1 - General practice: struggling to deliver JF - British Journal of General Practice JO - Br J Gen Pract SP - 708 LP - 709 DO - 10.3399/bjgp11X612918 VL - 61 IS - 593 AU - Larry A Green AU - Benjamin F Miller Y1 - 2011/12/01 UR - http://bjgp.org/content/61/593/708.abstract N2 - ‘There is no groove of abstractions which is adequate for the comprehension of human life.’1Perhaps without exception, the insightful and broad array of issues concerning general medical practice surfaced by the report Guiding Patients Through Complexity: Modern Medical Generalism2 are active in the US health policy arena and in other countries. The issues seem to be big and agnostic to forms of government and models of healthcare organisation and finance.The assessments, conclusions, and recommendations of this report and the methods used to make them are similar and aligned with other serious studies.3,4 A particular strength of the report is the way it incorporates the voices and perspectives of patients, families, and communities: the people in charge of defining the work of generalist physicians. The report loudly echoes the life work of the late Barbara Starfield5 and her pointed claim that primary care is medicine’s way of improving population health and relieving disparities, while containing costs — and no study shows otherwise.As this report states, general medical practice is more than primary care, cutting across all care levels, powered by the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary to integrate care for people across often arbitrary boundaries. This ability to integrate care can overcome the troubling fragmentation of specialised and dislocated services, and integration is the work of generalists. While the report illuminates what is needed by people … ER -