Primary health care as doctor training ground

MEDIA RELEASE

Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners

12 March 2009

Primary health care seen increasingly as doctor training ground

The primary health care sector is an under-utilised resource for medical education, believes Peter Crampton, dean of the Wellington School of Medicine and Health Science of the University of Otago.

Professor Crampton says the combined forces of ageing demographics, advances in community-based medical treatments for chronic illnesses, a commitment to reducing health inequalities and cost pressures “increasingly conspire” to push health education into primary care settings.

“Medical education must mirror this trend,” he says, if for no other reason than the practical imperative that medical education needs to occur where the bulk of treatment occurs.”

In a guest editorial in a new medical journal, the Journal of Primary Health Care, Professor Crampton describes the numbers as “compelling;” four out of five children and adults visit their GP at least once in a 12-month period, and with the mean number of visits being 3.2 per year this accounts for millions of individual contacts.

The Journal is the flagship publication of the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners, and takes over from the New Zealand Family Physician.

A second College publication to undergo a transformation, GP Pulse, will be available at the end of the month.

Edited by academic GP Associate Professor Felicity Goodyear-Smith, the Journal provides both original scientific papers and a new feature Back to Back, where Auckland Professor of General Practice Bruce Arroll debates with colleague Associate Professor Ngaire Kerse – acknowledged as one of New Zealand’s leading geriatricians – the premise that GPs should prescribe more benzodiazepines for the elderly. Professor Arroll says Yes.

Benzodiazepines are minor tranquillisers and hypnotics such as bromazepam, chloridiazepozide, diazepam or oxazepam.

Both new College publications will be produced quarterly. The Journal is available on the College website at http://www.rnzcgp.org.nz/journal-of-primary-health-care-01/

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