The term, primary care, currently garners little respect among medical circles.
Prospective doctors pick up on this during training, making it one reason why they tend to gravitate towards specialties.
So, should “primary care” undergo re-branding?
Internist Robert Centor thinks so, saying, “Primary care suffers in part because so few decision makers really understand how complex primary care is. So I recommend that we no longer use the phrase to describe this important, complex and rewarding profession.”
But, the ACP’s Bob Doherty says this may not be the right time to do so: “I think this would be unwise at a time when politicians and policymakers alike seem to buy into the idea that ‘primary care’ is the keystone of a high performing health care system.”
And indeed, given the prominent attention politicians have been recently paying to the importance of primary care, I tend to agree.
Related posts:
- Why mid-level providers will not take over primary care
- Primary care is a lousy term
- The primary care problem
- What role should nurse practitioners play in primary care?
- When primary care refuses to accept Medicare
- Are family physicians better suited to practice primary care?
- Blame the RUC for the primary care crisis, or not
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The other consideration might be “comprehensive care”.
Or how about a true branding opportunity of “Primary Care” with the tagline – “We have your back when it comes to your comprehensive care”
Comprehensive Medicine
“We’re not your partialist.”
To be crude, you can put lipstick on the pig, but that won’t make anyone else will want to kiss it.
While we are discussing re-branding, how about throwing out the term “provider” as applied to the primary care physician? What medical student in their right mind would want to choose a specialty that would lump them together with those who underwent far less rigorous training?
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