Then the consultant mus not only satisfy the patient but also satisfy the family physician. The family doctor should have a deep commitment to people and obtain his greatest professional fulfilment from his relations with people, to believe in the primacy of the person, to use technology with skill but to make it always subservient to the interest of the person. Attempts to produce a family doctor by putting together conventional training in paediatrics and internal medicine and adding some psychiatry are doomed to failure. The whole is different from the sum of its parts. Family doctors may emerge in this way but they will do so by the arduous route of rising above their training and learning from thir own experience.
Family physicians have distinctive values and ways of thinkgin and feeling.
It follow that nobody is going to learn family medicine from those who are not family physicians or in an environment that is alien to its ethos. The core and essence of his education must be the experience of family practice.