Anticipatory care has an important role in general practice

Martin and colleagues’ article on how general practice is sacrificing patient care for prevention saddened me.1 I recently reread Julian Tudor Hart’s book A New Kind of Doctor, in which he dismantles the medical education model dominant in the 20th century,2 which was based on consultant specialists dealing with episodic illnesses in a reactive hospital setting. In a lecture in 1990, he said that health and prevention in primary care had been settled in a Royal College of General Practitioners report back in 1970.34

Expanding reactive …