Team Care in General Practice

When this book was originally published in 1976, general practice had developed enormously in the preceding years and one of the most important changes was the creation of the Primary Health Care Team. This book provides the context for how the ‘new-style’ general practice came about and examines the Primary Health Care Team in action. Part 1 discusses the rapid development of general practice in Britain. It selects one Primary Health Care Team and describes a detailed workload audit carried out in 1972. One of the most significant findings was the comparatively small workload for the General Practitioner when they were integrated into a well-functioning team. Part 2 analyses the results of a detailed Patient Satisfaction Survey, conducted by a university sociology team. Several hypotheses were tested, all relating to the satisfaction that the patients had with the overall health care service that they received.

Peter R. Kaim-Caudle was for many years Professor of Sociology at Durham University and worked on secondment with the Economic and Social Research Institute in the 1960s, and was a visiting lecturer at the Institute of Public Administration for more than 20 years. His book Comparative Social Policy and Social Security (1973) made him internationally known and led to him accepting teaching invitations at universities in Taiwan, Australia, Canada, Fiji, Ghana, and Sierra Leone, as well as at University College Cork. After the second World War he became an economics lecturer at Dundee University and moved to Durham University in 1950. There he established the Department of Social Administration and was the first Professor of Social Administration. He was active as a Workers’ Education Association extension lecturer in the Durham mining communities in his early years there. He joined the Labour Party and was a supporter of European integration, which he saw as a way of preventing Europe’s wars. A regular visitor to Ireland, he spent two extended periods here, for nine months in 1963 – 1964 at the Economic Research Institute, as it then was, and as a research professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute, as it became, for three years, 1968 to 1971.

Geoffrey Norman Marsh, MBE, MD, FRCGP, MCFPC, DCH, DObst, RCOG

Geoffrey Marsh worked as a general practitioner for 35 years at Norton Medical Centre, Stockton-on-Tees. In 1974 he was Visiting Associate Professor in Family Medicine at University of Iowa, USA; and from 1978-80 he was RCGP Wolfson Visiting Professor to University of Montreal, Canada. His work developing a comprehensive primary health care team resulted in an MD from University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He carried out a number of research studies into teamwork and his published books are Team Care in General Practice, Modern Obstetrics in General Practice [1985, ed.], Efficient Care in General Practice [1991], Counselling in Primary Health Care [1995, ed. with Jane Keithley] and Community-Based Maternity Care [1999, ed. with Mary Renfrew].