Lessons from bad general practice.

The paucity of resources for general practice correlates well with high losses through emigration and questions the expensive over-production of doctors now being undertaken.The variable quality of community care and the absence of a structure yet providing real planning or capital, leads to the uneconomic abuse of hospital facilities and to an excessive emphasis on institutionalisation.Medicine is becoming depersonalised because unrealistic expectations lead to an overloading of the service. Simultaneously we allocate a low priority to education in the use of the service, have little training in the sociological aspects of medical care, and even less in how best to use the skills of our non-medical professional colleagues.