Editor's Briefing

British Journal of General Practice

Roger Jones¹ 

DOI  :  10.3399/bjgp12X653787

学科分类：卫生学

来源: Royal College of General Practitioners

【 摘 要 】

Unsurprisingly, patients’ priorities for medical care are centred on diagnosis; doctors are expected to listen properly, do a physical examination, and find out and tell the patient what is wrong. Aneurin Bevan expressed this view forcibly during a debate about community hospitals: ‘I would rather be kept alive in the efficient if cold altruism of a large hospital than expire in a gush of warm sympathy in a small one’. The days of wallowing in uncertainty, and perversely making a virtue out of tolerating it, are over, and first-contact clinicians have a duty of care that includes making early, accurate diagnoses as often as possible. The challenges of doing so are captured in a series of papers in this issue of the BJGP, and deftly explored in Kevin Barraclough’s editorial. We clearly aren’t there yet, and Barraclough makes a plea for more research into diagnostic decision making and the use of investigative technologies, arguing that the funding available for research of this kind is disproportionately small in relation to the importance of the subject. I completely agree — and would urge funders and researchers to think about the kinds of multidisciplinary research needed to move us into the 21st century, where cognitive psychologists, information scientists, engineers, and mathematicians will collaborate with clinicians to devise fresh approaches to capturing and analysing all the available patient data that are relevant to each presenting patient problem.

【 授权许可】

Unknown