Primary Care Revisited

This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach with a wide scope of perspectives on primary healthcare, describing related principles, care models, practices and social contexts. It combines aspects of development, research and education applied in primary health care, providing practitioners and scholars with a comprehensive overview of the current knowledge and delivery models of healthcare in community settings. It covers the practical, philosophical and scholarly issues pertinent to the delivery, financing, planning, ethics, health politics, professional and technological development, resources, and monitoring in primary health care. Contributors are from a diverse range of academic and professional backgrounds, bringing together collective expertise in mainstream medicine, nursing, allied health, Chinese medicine, health economics, administration, law, public policy, housing management, information technology and mass communications. As such, the book does not follow the common clinical practice or service-based approach found in most texts on primary care.The contents will serve as a useful reference work for policymakers, researchers, community health practitioners, health executives and higher education students.

This book adopts an interdisciplinary approach with a wide scope of perspectives on primary healthcare, describing related principles, care models, practices and social contexts. It combines aspects of development, research and education applied in primary health care, providing practitioners and scholars with a comprehensive overview of the current knowledge and delivery models of healthcare in community settings. It covers the practical, philosophical and scholarly issues pertinent to the delivery, financing, planning, ethics, health politics, professional and technological development, resources, and monitoring in primary health care. Contributors are from a diverse range of academic and professional backgrounds, bringing together collective expertise in mainstream medicine, nursing, allied health, Chinese medicine, health economics, administration, law, public policy, housing management, information technology and mass communications. As such, the book does not follow the common clinical practice or service-based approach found in most texts on primary care. The contents will serve as a useful reference work for policymakers, researchers, community health practitioners, health executives and higher education students.

Ensuring that members of society are healthy and reaching their full potential requires the prevention of disease and injury; the promotion of health and well-being; the assurance of conditions in which people can be healthy; and the provision of timely, effective, and coordinated health care. Achieving substantial and lasting improvements in population health will require a concerted effort from all these entities, aligned with a common goal. The Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) requested that the Institute of Medicine (IOM) examine the integration of primary care and public health. Primary Care and Public Health identifies the best examples of effective public health and primary care integration and the factors that promote and sustain these efforts, examines ways by which HRSA and CDC can use provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act to promote the integration of primary care and public health, and discusses how HRSA-supported primary care systems and state and local public health departments can effectively integrate and coordinate to improve efforts directed at disease prevention. This report is essential for all health care centers and providers, state and local policy makers, educators, government agencies, and the public for learning how to integrate and improve population health.

‘This study of general practice and the attitudes of patients and general practitioners to it is the most significant book yet written about the NHS.’ This was how the reviewer in the ‘British Medical Journal’ reviewed Ann Cartwright’s earlier book Patients and their Doctors. In General Practice Revisited, originally published in 1981, Ann Cartwright and Robert Anderson compare the experiences and views described in the first study, carried out in 1964, with those revealed by a second survey in 1977.In the intervening period there were a great many changes in the organization of general practice. For example appointment systems and nurses working in the surgery became the rule rather than the exception, and the number of doctors working in health centres or using deputizing services rose dramatically. This study shows how the basic patient-doctor relationship has been affected by these changes. A fundamental feature of the survey is the demonstration that the attitudes and practices of patients and doctors are linked, and that it is possible to relate the experiences and degree of satisfaction of patients to the doctor’s age, sex, size of practice, equipment, ancillary help, and indeed to the doctor’s views and habits.By bringing the picture of general practice up-to-date Ann Cartwright and Robert Anderson provided the basic data for any discussion of primary health care in this country at the time.

Primary Health Care: People, Practice, Place draws together significant contributions from established experts across a variety of disciplines to focus on changes in practices, technologies, and the changing nature of societies and populations. With arguments well-supported by empirical research, this book will appeal not only to scholars across a range of social and health sciences, but also to professionals involved in health services.

This work contains foreword by Ian R McWhinney, Emeritus Professor of General Practice, Schulich School of Medicine and Dentistry, Centre for Studies in Family Medicine University of Western Ontario, Canada. This ground-breaking book encourages a re-focus on the subjective and social nature of health and illness. It helps healthcare professionals find fresh perspectives to assist patients, many of whom are threatened by and lost in a healthcare system dominated by diseases and procedures. The book takes a whole systems approach to primary care, incorporating new developments, social aspects, critical discourse, international perspectives, and the history and philosophy of medicine. It is a stimulating and inspiring read for general practitioners and other primary healthcare professionals, undergraduate and postgraduate medical students, healthcare educators, academics, and primary care researchers. Healthcare policy makers and shapers will value its lucid account of complex issues. 'Joachim Sturmberg has written an important book, which I sincerely hope the reformers of our health care system will study carefully. It is also a riveting read. With great erudition and strong arguments, Sturmberg lays out a plan which leads to a goal to which we all aspire - a health care system based on primary care and primary health care which expresses the historic values of medicine and adapts itself to the complexity of modern medicine. A must read for anyone who has the interests of primary care at heart.' - Ian R McWhinney, in the Foreword.

General practitioners and other primary care professionals have a leading role in contemporary health care, which Trisha Greenhalgh explores in this highly praised new text. She provides perceptive and engaging insights into primary health care, focussing on: its intellectual roots its impact on the individual, the family and the community the role of the multidisciplinary team contemporary topics such as homelessness, ethnic health and electronic records. Concise summaries, highlighted boxes, extensive referencing and a dedicated section on effective learning make this essential reading for postgraduate students, tutors and researchers in primary care. "Trish Greenhalgh, in her frequent columns in the British Medical Journal...more than any other medical journalist spoke to her fellow GPs in the language of experience, but never without linking this to our expanding knowledge from the whole of human science. When I compare the outlines of primary care so lucidly presented in this wonderful book, obviously derived from rich experience of real teaching and learning, with the grand guignol theatre of London medical schools when I was a student 1947-52, the advance is stunning." —From the foreword by Julian Tudor Hart "Trish Greenhalgh is one of the international stars of general practice and a very clever thinker. This new book is a wonderful resource for primary health care and general practice. Every general practice registrar should read this book and so should every general practice teacher and primary care researcher." —Professor Michael Kidd, Head of the Department of General Practice, University of Sydney and Immediate Past President of The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners "This important new book by one of primary care's most accomplished authors sets out clearly the academic basis for further developments in primary health care. Health systems will only function effectively if they recognise the importance of high quality primary care so I strongly recommend this book to students, teachers, researchers, practitioners and policy makers." —Professor Martin Marshall, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health, UK