Category: Primary Care / General Practice

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has inaugurated a strategic branding campaign to highlight the importance of family medicine in the national conversation on health care reform. This week the AAFP launched a $5-million dollar, advertising campaign promoting the fact that a patient-centered approach to health care leads to better disease prevention, better coordinated care and a healthier public, as well as decreased costs.

New guidance launched at the Children’s Hospital for Wales outlines doctors’ roles and responsibilities towards children and young people. This is the first time that doctors’ specific duties in this area have been defined by the General Medical Council (GMC), the regulator for the UK’s 240,000 doctors.

Two years after Hurricane Katrina, the ratio of physicians to residents in the New Orleans area is about the same as it was before the storm, but patients still have trouble accessing health care, according to a BlueCross BlueShield of Louisiana report released on Monday, the Baton Rouge Advocate reports.

With a Medicare reimbursement cut of 10% scheduled for physicians in January 2008, health care providers and their “well-armed lobbyists are pressing Democratic leaders to make the first changes to Medicare policy since they took control of Congress,” CQ Weekly reports. The cut could have a wide impact because it is likely to affect reimbursement rates from insurers, who typically use government programs’ payment levels as guidelines. The

The views of Scotland’s junior doctors on the way forward for recruitment to specialty training in Scotland for 2008 and beyond will today be presented to the Scottish Government. BMA Scotland is keen to ensure that the disasters of this year’s MTAS and MMC system*, which caused months of confusion and uncertainty for many junior doctors, are not repeated.

Doctors warned that rural GP services are increasingly under threat as new pharmacies are introduced into small rural communities in Scotland, without local consultation into the consequences for patient services in the area. The warning comes at the start of Rural Health Week (1 - 6 October 2007). GPs in some of the most isolated communities in Scotland offer pharmacy-type dispensing services and are known as ‘dispensing doctors’.

A UCSF research team has developed a simple tool that can improve the effectiveness of communication between doctors and patients about prescribed medications and result in dramatic improvements in health and safety.The new communication tool involves a computer-generated weekly calendar with color images of the medication to be taken each day, combined with instructions written in English and in a patient’s native language if the patient does not speak English.

Dr Laurence Buckman, chairman of the BMA’s GPs Committee, responded to the Conservative Party’s plan to renegotiate the GP contract saying: “It is sad that the Conservatives have failed to understand why we needed a new GP contract. All sides recognised that the UK had too few family doctors. Recruitment was at an all time low, and doctors were thinking of taking early retirement because of the unsustainable workload.

Family doctors in England’s GP practices have once again demonstrated high standards of patient care in the national system that measures the quality of services they provide. Latest figures for the Quality and Outcomes Framework (QOF) published yesterday show general practice teams in England achieved 95.5% of the points available. The Quality and Outcomes Framework was introduced in April 2004 as part of the new national GP contract.

New figures from The Information Centre for health and social care show that GP practices in England continue to deliver high quality care against a more challenging set of indicators. In 2006/07 practices were awarded an average score of 95.5 per cent achievement against a set of indicators of the quality of care provided to patients.