New core competencies for general practice – primary care of the future.

Primary care, despite being in Italy still far from achieving organizational structures appropriate for the times, are already being required due to the rapid evolution of medicine to reconsider their essential competencies. The high prevalence of patients with complex profiles of comorbidities and multimorbidity, new monitoring and communication technologies that are being introduced at a fast pace, in addition to a large amount of information to be processed, the availability of effective but extremely expensive new classes of drugs, the awareness of the contemporary non short-term contraction of available resources, pose challenging problems in terms of organization, but perhaps in particular in terms of professional and ethical issues.

To these crucial issues, our public health system at the moment seems only capable of reacting by increasing barriers to access, by codifying through decrees the parameters of appropriateness, by exacerbating the dichotomy between management and care functions. Ultimately further digging a furrow between managers and care providers, and relegating primary care to the role of formal performer.

In this scenario, the “strong ideas” that have long provided the constitutive professional identity of general practice (the only “primary care” existing on a local scale until not so long ago) such as the function of gate-keeper for entry in the system, or as the holder of an exclusive a priori and privileged relationship with the patient, now seem to be gradually taking the character of “weak thought”.
Other competency profiles seem to become more relevant, such as the ability to:

• manage the not only clinical determinants of frailty;
• identify profiles of unequal access to care;
• “unmask” distorted ideas on the benefit / risk of the most common procedures in clinical practice and produce a shared and practicable culture of appropriateness;
• support and advise the patient in the choices of complex and multidisciplinary tratment;
• redefine the relationship between the care provider function and the managerial tasks of managing scarce resources.

The crucial role of training in general medicine and its flexibility make it of particular interest to identify innovative and central issues for the definition of the professional training program. We felt it was appropriate to organize a seminar on these issues with the aim to analyze, discuss and share the potential and emerging competency profiles for primary care, and identify a more comprehensive educational program.

ECM
The meeting provides credit accrual for continuing medical education for the Physician-Surgeon professional category (discipline: General Practitioner). Educational objective: epidemiology – prevention and health promotion with the acquisition of technical and professional knowledge. Credits accrued: 4.5.
The event is free. Registration within november 25, 2016 is required. Available seats: 50
The meeting is intended as a time for exchange and provides for the discussion of topics in working groups. For this reason the number of seats is limited. Participants should contact organizers well in advance in case they cannot attend the event so that their seats can be assigned to other interested colleagues.