PURPOSE The purpose of this paper is to comprehensively characterise the current use of electronic health records (EHRs) and personal digital assistants (PDAs) among family physicians in Florida; and to compare family physicians with other doctors with respect to the functions commonly used on their EHR and PDA systems. METHODS A postal survey was sent to family physicians (n=2076) and other ...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Family physicians are trained to assess mental health symptoms and provide some mental health interventions to their patients. Because of obstacles to referring patients to mental health specialists, many family physicians independently provide outpatient mental health treatment such as brief office counseling. Questions exist regarding physicians' interest in, perceiv...

BACKGROUND Integrated team-based primary care is an international imperative. This is required more so in Africa, where fragmented verticalised care dominates. South Africa is trying to address this with health reforms, including Primary Health Care Re-engineering. Family physicians are already contributing to primary care despite family medicine being only fully registered as a full specialty ...

INTRODUCTION The scope of practice by general practitioners and family physicians in North America has been changing over time. Are academic practices providing residents the same scope of practice as the urban practices into which they are going? METHODS A survey describing the activities and scope of general practice/family practice was constructed from the literature and checked with gener...

In many countries, family medicine (FM) training has been conducted mainly by senior family physicians alone. However, FM training in Singapore in the last 30 years has involved specialists working in close collaboration with family physicians. The areas in which specialists are currently involved include the training of FM trainees in tertiary hospitals, the Master of Medicine in Family Medici...

OBJECTIVE To describe the characteristics and practice patterns of family physicians who regularly treat long-term care (LTC) residents in order to inform quality improvement strategies. DESIGN Cross-sectional study involving a 2005 province-wide census of LTC residents' charts linked to additional health care administrative databases. SETTING All LTC homes in Ontario. PARTICIPANTS Reside...

CONTEXT Scope of practice is an important factor in both training and recruiting rural family physicians. PURPOSE To assess rural Idaho family physicians' scope of practice and to examine variations in scope of practice across variables such as gender, age and employment status. METHODS A survey instrument was developed based on a literature review and was validated by physician educators, ...

In Canada, it has long been a given that physicians treat entire families. This notion is so deeply rooted in the culture of family medicine that it is part of the name of our discipline. The world in which we live has changed, however, and so have our patients and our discipline. It is high time that we asked ourselves whether a “family” practice is still a desirable practice. I will attempt t...