Professional independence in general practice

Abstract

The first association one gets when thinking about independence in is that independence is good. We all want to be independent and free. For me, coming form Slovenia, this feeling is perhaps even deeper. Slovenia regained its independence after a thousand years of being ruled by Germans, Austrians, Italians, Hungarians and Serbs. Nevertheless, we have always cherished the fact that we are different and have tried hard to maintain our independence as much as possible. What is interesting is that even though it took us a thousand years to reach independence, we are now trying very hard to join the European union. We are trading our independence for a value of belonging to EU. And the feelings of pride that we are achieving its standards are comparable to the feelings of pride when we became independent from Yugoslavia. This is a strange contradiction. When I lecture about independence to medical students, I do that in a context of family as a unit of care. I try to describe family as a system and how it develops over time and the problems it faces during various stages. I can not do that without addressing the systems theory, which is very useful in describing complex systems.