I have noticed that there is no day when politicians do not talk about family doctors in the media. They promise family doctor for everyone, health centers to work, and a NHS make a difference. But do you know what a family doctor does?
Since 1990, general and family medicine has been a specialty. This means that to be a specialist in general and family medicine, after six years of medicine and one year of access to boarding school, the doctor has four years of specialized training. So many years as an ophthalmologist, for example.
In these four years the training objectives are well defined and go through several areas.
By the obstetrics where one learns to watch healthy pregnant women and recognize signs of alarm, pediatrics in order to follow children since they are born, psychiatry where competences are gaining to treat and medicate diseases such as anxiety or depression, and even the emergency services of internal medicine, general surgery and orthopedics.
In the four years we have learned to talk about contraception and intra uterine devices, to watch healthy pregnancy, to accompany children, and to recognize the main childhood diseases, to suture or cook wounds, and even to medicate anxiety or depression. And every year we have tests that ensure that the training objectives have been met to ensure that our future users will be well accompanied.
All of this makes a doctor with this specialty very complete and quite different from what would be if I had no specialty.
At the Health Center, where I appoints me, they have already asked what is my specialty, and how I know how to make a cytology, or start insulin in a new diagnosis of diabetes. And it is precisely because I have specific training for that.
The truth is that it is impossible to know a lot of everything, but we have training, and experience, to take care of the population at all stages of life. We also know how to recognize when there are signs of alarm that should be evaluated, and at what time we should refer to an expert from another area or to hospital care.
We can’t just talk about family doctors without recognizing that there is still a lot of stigma around this specialty. And I have always had some difficulty understanding how the only specialty that accompanies a life from start to finish, and looks to the patient as a whole, encompassing complaints in the social context, economic context, and psychological context, can be so undervalued.
None of us are just a diabetes, or hypertension, or a pregnancy. It is important to know if we are unemployed, if we are going through a divorce, or if we suddenly lose autonomy to go for a walk, which was what gave us the most courage in life.
The real problem of urgencies is not only resolved to reinforce teams, and invest more and more money in treatments and exams. It is resolved by reinforcing primary health care, which can actually bet on prevention, early diagnosis, the tracks, and a holistic medicine that looks at the person and their environment.
If we continue to have more and more disease, family doctors will never be enough, and political promises will continue to be highly unrealistic.
Only with the appreciation of prevention and a team that includes nurses, technical and social assistants, psychologists, nutritionists, and even exercise professionals, we can make a lot of difference in the future of NHS.
Therefore, you already know, value your family team and know that being a family doctor implies long and organized training.
