Badmouthing GPs

Abstract

The recent issue on general practice (7 July 2003) contained many statements that were inaccurate and unfair to a profession that has existed before most specialties and will exist beyond their passing. It is unfortunate that the issue represents an opportunity missed.Notwithstanding the funding issues, general practice is not "in crisis", as many of your authors would attest. 1 It is vibrant and leading the way in healthcare reform in this country, and much of its loss of appeal to new doctors has to do with the attitudes of many of the authors, who talk it down rather than up.The quoted comment from Donald Berwick -"we are carrying the nineteenth-century clinical office into the twenty-first-century world" 2 -is surely the most inaccurate statement. Modern general practices bear no relationship to even their mid-20th-century counterparts, whereas the average specialist office still looks the same and functions in a similar way. General practice is over 80% computerised, 3 unlike the practices of our specialist colleagues. General practice has been responding to the challenges of a community-centred approach, while specialists still respond to a disease-centred model. Indeed, many members of the profession correctly talk about research as a means of raising the profile of general practicein this regard, the specialties have been hiding behind the power and influence of research institutes.Until funding bodies such as the National Health and Medical Research Council give general practice research priority over such esoteric areas as "Major porcine antigens for the generation and modulation of immune responses to neovascularised pig tissue xenografts" ($480,000) 4 in allocating research grants, things will not change.

Family Doctors Seen through the Eyes of Specialists: A Qualitative Study

“…Studies in the field of undergraduate education have shown that “badmouthing” of family medicine negatively influences students in their career choice [5, 15, 16]. “Badmouthing” is defined as “unjustified, negative, and slanderous comments by physicians about other physicians in various branches of medicine” [15].…”