Textbook of Family Medicine – NINTH EDITION / كتاب طب الأسرة – الطبعة التاسعة

Textbook of Family Medicine – NINTH EDITION:

The family physician provides continuing, comprehensive care in a personalized manner to patients of all ages, regardless of the presence of disease or the nature of the presenting complaint.

Family physicians accept responsibility for managing an individual’s total health needs while maintaining an intimate, confidential relationship with the patient.

Family medicine emphasizes continuing responsibility for total health care—from the first contact and initial assessment through the ongoing care of chronic problems.

Prevention and early recognition of disease are essential features of the discipline. Coordination and integration of all necessary health services (minimizing fragmentation) and the skills to manage most medical problems allow family physicians to provide cost-effective health care.

Family medicine is a specialty that shares many areas of content with other clinical disciplines, incorporating this shared knowledge and using it uniquely to deliver primary medical care.

In addition to sharing content with other medical specialties, family medicine’s foundation remains clinical, with the primary focus on the medical care of people who are ill.

The curriculum for training family physicians is designed to represent realistically the skills and body of knowledge that the physicians will require in practice.

This curriculum is based on an analysis of the problems seen and the skills used by family physicians in their practice.

The randomly educated primary physician has been replaced by one specifically prepared to address the types of problems likely to be encountered in practice. For this reason, the “model office” is an essential component of all family medicine residency programs.