Hadassah Study Recommends Multi-disciplinary Approach to Comprehensive Patient Care

A “return to comprehensive patient care” and the “creation of a new ‘image’ of the family physician” has been recommended here in a report to the 57th annual national convention of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. The report, which has been published in English in Israel by the Jerusalem Academic Press, contends after a six-year study that these goals “will require changes in the education of physicians–the teaching methods, the kind of teachers appointed and the framework within which teaching is conducted.” Furthermore, it says, “The curricula of the preclinical courses will have to be adapted to the goals and purposes of the new orientation to comprehensive family care, and an extramural framework for teaching should be established in the family clinics to complement that provided at present in the hospital departments.” To that end, the report recommends the following “interim action” : “Medical students should be brought into contact with patients during the early preclinical years of study; studies in the behavioral and social sciences should be introduced during the early stages of clinical teaching; a number of family physicians should immediately be integrated into Departments of Medicine in regional hospitals and trained for teaching duties; teaching in community health facilities should supplement teaching in hospital departments.” Similar recommendations are made for the teaching of nurses.

“Such a program would not only encourage more physicians to elect family practice as their specialty but would provide better health care to the population,” wrote Dr. Kalman J. Mann. Director General of the Hadassah Medical Organization. He was assisted in the study by Prof. Jack H. Medalie of the Tel Aviv University Medical School; Prof. Louis Guttman of the Hebrew University; Elinor Lieber of the Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center, part of the Hadassah Medical Organization, and Dr. Johannes J. Groen of the University of Leiden, the Netherlands. Their report, titled “Visits to Doctors,” derived from an attempt to determine the truth of the concept of “doctor-proneness”–“the clinical impression that some people hardly ever visit a doctor, whereas others are ‘regular customers.’ ” The Hadassah study, said Dr. Mann, found that “doctor-proneness” did not exist over a period of three years or more. The researchers confirmed the implication–“which family doctors have believed for many years, but which up till now was very difficult to examine”–that “people’s social and emotional difficulties are reflected in the general health state and therefore physician contacts.”