Welcome to the Department of Family Medicine

Over the past 50 years Family Medicine has established itself worldwide not only as an academic discipline with its own curriculum, research base, and peer reviewed journals but also as the cornerstone of most national healthcare systems in Europe. The Department ensures medical students achieve a working diagnostic and therapeutic knowledge across the reach of biomedical science and are able to forge effective and continuing relationships with an enormous range of individual patients. Students are taught to understand the processes by which illness is socially constructed within the patient's life, and that they must mediate between the patient's subjective experience of illness and the scientific explanation.

The teaching agenda of the Department:

• is based on academic research and evidence about all core functions of a family physician
• is based on adapted evidence from the biomedical, psychological, and social sciences
• is aimed at training the student to be part of an integrated and comprehensive healthcare system
• has a balanced agenda across prevention, diagnosis, cure, care, and palliation