A physician, medical practitioner, medical doctor, or simply doctor is a health professional who practices medicine, which is concerned with promoting, maintaining or restoring health through the study, diagnosis, prognosis and treatment of disease, injury, and other physical and mental impairments. Physicians may focus their practice on certain disease categories, types of patients, and methods of treatment—known as specialities—or they may assume responsibility for the provision of continuing and comprehensive medical care to individuals, families, and communities—known as general practice. Medical practice properly requires both a detailed knowledge of the academic disciplines, such as anatomy and physiology, underlying diseases and their treatment—the science of medicine—and also a decent competence in its applied practice—the art or craft of medicine.
In the medical profession, a general practitioner (GP) or family physician is a doctor who is a consultant in general practice. GPs have distinct expertise and experience in providing whole person medical care whilst managing the complexity, uncertainty and risk associated with the continuous care they provide. GPs work at the heart of their communities, striving to provide comprehensive and equitable care for everyone, taking into account their health care needs, stage of life and background. GPs work in, connect with and lead multidisciplinary teams that care for people and their families, respecting the context in which they live, aiming to ensure all of their physical and mental health needs are met. They are trained to treat patients to levels of complexity that vary between countries. The term "primary care physician" is more usually used in the US.
Health care, or healthcare, is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health professionals and allied health fields. Medicine, dentistry, pharmacy, midwifery, nursing, optometry, audiology, psychology, occupational therapy, physical therapy, athletic training, and other health professions all constitute health care. The term includes work done in providing primary care, secondary care, and tertiary care, as well as in public health.
Primary care is the day-to-day healthcare given by a health care provider. Typically this provider acts as the first contact and principal point of continuing care for patients within a healthcare system, and coordinates other specialist care that the patient may need. Patients commonly receive primary care from professionals such as a primary care physician, a physician assistant, a physical therapist, or a nurse practitioner. In some localities, such a professional may be a registered nurse, a pharmacist, a clinical officer, or an Ayurvedic or other traditional medicine professional. Depending on the nature of the health condition, patients may then be referred for secondary or tertiary care.
The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) was founded in 1947 to promote and maintain high-quality standards for family medicine, an offshoot of the classical general practitioner. It is headquartered in Leawood, Kansas.
Family medicine is a medical specialty within primary care that provides continuing and comprehensive health care for the individual and family across all ages, genders, diseases, and parts of the body. The specialist, who is usually a primary care physician, is named a family physician. It is often referred to as general practice and a practitioner as a general practitioner. Historically, their role was once performed by any doctor with qualifications from a medical school and who works in the community. However, since the 1950s, family medicine / general practice has become a specialty in its own right, with specific training requirements tailored to each country. The names of the specialty emphasize its holistic nature and/or its roots in the family. It is based on knowledge of the patient in the context of the family and the community, focusing on disease prevention and health promotion. According to the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA), the aim of family medicine is "promoting personal, comprehensive and continuing care for the individual in the context of the family and the community". The issues of values underlying this practice are usually known as primary care ethics.
A primary care physician (PCP) is a physician who provides both the first contact for a person with an undiagnosed health concern as well as continuing care of varied medical conditions, not limited by cause, organ system, or diagnosis. The term is primarily used in the United States. In the past, the equivalent term was 'general practitioner' in the US; however in the United Kingdom and other countries the term general practitioner is still used. With the advent of nurses as PCPs, the term PCP has also been expanded to denote primary care providers.
A medical specialty is a branch of medical practice that is focused on a defined group of patients, diseases, skills, or philosophy. Examples include those branches of medicine that deal exclusively with children (paediatrics), cancer (oncology), laboratory medicine (pathology), or primary care. After completing medical school or other basic training, physicians or surgeons and other clinicians usually further their medical education in a specific specialty of medicine by completing a multiple-year residency to become a specialist.
The International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC) is a classification method for primary care encounters. The ICPC-3 strives to be a person centered classification for Primary Care, building on the foundations of the ICPC-2. It includes references to existing international standards such as ICD-10, ICD-11, ICF as well as SNOMED CT clinical terminology. It provides a framework for documenting and organizing clinical data from primary care patient contacts.
ICPC-2 PLUS is an extended terminology classified to ICPC-2 International Classification of Primary Care, which aids data entry, retrieval and analysis. ICPC-2 PLUS takes into account the frequency distribution of problems seen in primary health care. It allows for the classification of the patient's reason for encounter (RFE), the problems/diagnosis managed, primary care interventions, and the ordering of the data of the primary care session in an episode of care structure.
Jan De Maeseneer is a Belgian family physician and has been Head of the Department of Family Medicine and Primary Health Care of Ghent University (1991–2017).
Dr. M. K. Rajakumar was a Malaysian doctor and socialist politician. As a doctor, he was a pioneer of the discipline of Family Medicine by general practitioners in Malaysia. As a leftist intellectual he was among the leaders of the Labour Party of Malaya and Barisan Sosialis in the 1960s, helping to build the Labour Party alongside Tan Chee Khoon, V. David and Ishak Haji Muhammad.
Professor José María Valderas Martínez is an Academic General Practitioner and health services researcher.
The Classification of Pharmaco-Therapeutic Referrals (CPR) is a taxonomy focused on defining and grouping together situations requiring a referral from pharmacists to physicians regarding the pharmacotherapy used by the patients. It has been published in 2008. It is bilingual: English/Spanish.
The quaternary prevention, concept coined by the Belgian general practitioner Marc Jamoulle, are the actions taken to identify a patient at risk of overmedicalisation, to protect them from new medical invasion, and to suggest interventions which are ethically acceptable.
Stuart John Carne is a retired medical general practitioner.
Michael Richard Kidd is an Australian medical practitioner, academic and author. He is Professor of Global Primary Care and Future Health Systems at the University of Oxford and Director of the Centre for Future Health Systems at the University of New South Wales. He is a past president of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners (RACGP) a past president of the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) and former Deputy Chief Medical Officer with the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care.
The Academy of Family Physicians of India (AFPI) is a professional academic society, registered as a non-profit organization in India. AFPI has been founded with the aim of promoting family medicine and primary healthcare. Family medicine is the practicing speciality and academic discipline of majority Indian doctors. Although there were GP associations such as IMA CGP and FFPAI have been existing for several decades, there was no forum for spearheading development of academic family medicine in India. AFPI is an equivalent organization to American Academy of Family Physicians, College of Family Physicians of Canada, Royal College of General Practitioners, Royal Australian College of General Practice for India.
Amanda Caroline Howe is a British medical doctor who works as a general practitioner and is a Professor of Primary Care. She is a former President of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and a former President of the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA).
Felicity Anne Goodyear-Smith is a medical doctor, academic, and public health advocate from New Zealand. She is Academic Head of Department & Goodfellow Postgraduate Chair of General Practice & Primary Health Care in the Faculty of Medical and Health Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.
