OAR@UM Community:

How illness presents in family practice

Sat, 01 Dec 1990 00:00:00 GMT

Title: How illness presents in family practice Abstract: Family medicine is a very different speciality to secondary care or specialist care medicine. A whole new set of knowledge and skills need to be acquired by the doctor moving from hospital specialist medicine to family medicine in the community. Part of the reason for this is the completely different presentation of illness in a family medicine setting. Traditionally, medicine has dealt with patients and diseases. The common pattern of medicine is that a patient is a person who has a disease. The disease has a cause. If the cause is dealt with, the disease disappears and the patient becomes a person again. Over the past ftfteen years it has become clear that this picture is inadequate to explain many medical consultations. The classic work on this subject was done by Zola in Massachusetts, USA. He showed that what brought people to a doctor was not necessarily a disease at all. Zola's work has been repeated and conftrmed by McWhinney in Canada, Howie in Edinburgh, and other workers in Holland, Sweden, Italy and Finland. Why then do patients present to doctors? What do we mean by illness and what is a disease?

The practice records

Sat, 01 Dec 1990 00:00:00 GMT

Title: The practice records Abstract: In the present society we have come to appreciate the value of information and in fact a major part of the economies of industrialised societies are based and depend on processing of information. Most well-run businesses need to have a good information-base to stay alive in this competitive world. In the service organisations such as in clinical medicine information is the very soul of the practice. It is generally agreed that documentation of clinical Number (%) 54 10.8 53 10.6 50 10.0 49 9.8 34 6.8 30 6.0 230 46.0 500 100.0 information is essential for the proper management of patients. This is obvious in the care of hospital patients and in those situations where several providers are looking after a patient. In general practice if had taken a bit longer to come to the realisation of the need to keep good records; and many general practitioners in , ancient times hardly felt the need to do so, relying as they did on their well-trained memory. Even nowadays, many practitioners' patient records do not have more form or content than a personal memo to jog their memories and assist them in their billings.

Practice premises

Sat, 01 Dec 1990 00:00:00 GMT

Title: Practice premises Abstract: The premises where doctors and patients meet for that consultation and where medical records are made vary enormously with the habits and cultures of the individual communities. However, even with the.subject of practice premises, there are certain principles. In this paper, I shall

Why patients consult : experience in a Maltese practice

Sat, 01 Dec 1990 00:00:00 GMT

Title: Why patients consult : experience in a Maltese practice Abstract: The Consultation is the central act of medicine and thus it deserves to be well understood. The state of health fluctuates and studies show that physicians see only a small fraction of the health problems experienced by the population at large. The only study which could be found relating to reasons for consultation in Malta was that by Agius Muscat and Carabott (1989 MMJ) which compared the content of general practice in health centres and in private practice of 8 GP's working in government and private practice. This paper looks at the reasons for consultations in a small practice in which the author practices and attempts to examine reasons as to why patients consult their family doctor.