Helen Salisbury: Rebranding our experts in family medicine

What is a GP? I suspect that if you asked a representative sample of people on the street, some might be unsure what the initials stood for, but nearly everyone would know that a GP is a local family doctor, the one they go to first with a health problem. Ideally, they’d associate the idea of a GP with someone familiar, an expert they already know and trust.The recent conference of UK local medical committees passed a motion calling for GPs to be rebranded as “consultants in family medicine” and for the General Medical Council’s GP register to be merged with the specialist register.1 I understand the feelings that drove this vote. A common grumble among GPs is that our expertise isn’t valued, despite our specialist skills in looking after whole families and managing complexity, multimorbidity, and polypharmacy. In recent years some GPs have been busy supervising allied health professionals…
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