We tend to identify generalism in medicine as being the realm of primary care physicians..namely GPs and Family Practitioners. Us. But maybe primary care nurses are more generalist than doctors. After all we have gone down the path of a far more biomedical understanding of health than nurses who I suspect are more psychosocial, ignoring of course those who have chosen to specialise in primary care areas such as wound dressing. Nurses seem to branch out more into the society issues, contextual things like being more focuses on family support for patients, social welfare provision etc. These are the sorts of things that I know a lot of doctors find frustrating and not something that we need to know about. After all doctors are professionals who do the important things like diagnose disease and conditions, all the while we quietly dig ourselves into another specialised ditch.
A case of seeing the trees, not the forest, for we have defined our world as medicine.
Interestingly I recently observed the benefit of being able to cover, in a generalist manner, realms outside of medicine. Over a medical career I have personally been fortunate to acquire two additional realms of experience, namely business governance and IT systems knowledge. Both have been experienced within the realm of health care, but combining all three was recently very useful in an analysis of the IT requirements of several large health organisations. I don’t profess to be an expert (specialist) in these two non medical realms, but knowing a little allows one to formulate a great overview of the issues and synthesise an understanding of how things work that you cannot do, even as a generalist doctor.
Now the problem is that medical training provides nothing outside of medicine, well in this country at least. In primary care, GPs tend to own the businesses but it seems none are trained in business governance anywhere in the training programs. No one trains in IT systems. A result has been one of often poor business practice and that other fascinating observation that doctors are to computer salepersons what doctors are car salesmen. I even know a practice that was sold one computer and network software in the days when networks were not integral with the operating system.
Now somewhere out there in this world, does anyone know of a doctor training program, be it undergraduate or post graduate that provides governance training, or even some business training ?
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