Generalist skills are vital to serve ageing population, says England’s CMO

Doctors should “recommit to maintaining generalist skills” as they specialise so they can “respond to the inexorable rise of multimorbidity,” England’s chief medical officer, Chris Whitty, has said.1 Speaking at a press briefing to announce his annual report, which focuses on health in an ageing society, Whitty said that the medical profession had become increasingly specialised over the past 30 years, despite multimorbidity becoming a “greater proportion of medicine.”“We should now stop saying it’s entirely reasonable to forget all your generalist stuff and say: absolutely, become a specialist,” he said. “Specialising is good, but you must maintain your generalist skills while you specialise, so you can deal with the principal problem as a specialist but you can simultaneously deal with all the other problems people have.”Whitty also said that the healthcare system must change to stop patients with “predictable clusters of diseases” having to go to several clinics to see…
Read Original Article: Generalist skills are vital to serve ageing population, says England’s CMO »