gms | German Medical Science

51. Kongress für Allgemeinmedizin und Familienmedizin

Deutsche Gesellschaft für Allgemeinmedizin und Familienmedizin (DEGAM)

21.09. - 23.09.2017, Düsseldorf

Where patient care and research come together

Meeting Abstract

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  • A. Knottnerus - Maastricht University Care and Public Health Research Institute (CAPHRI), Department of Family Medicine/General Practice, Maastricht, Niederlande

51. Kongress für Allgemeinmedizin und Familienmedizin. Düsseldorf, 21.-23.09.2017. Düsseldorf: German Medical Science GMS Publishing House; 2017. Doc17degam151

doi: 10.3205/17degam151, urn:nbn:de:0183-17degam1510

Published: September 5, 2017

© 2017 Knottnerus.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. See license information at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.


Outline

Text

Medical research is sometimes criticized that it produces evidence on groups, not on individual patients, and is therefore not helpful in clinical practice. But if a doctor finds his patients so unique that he always starts clinical reasoning from scratch, they should choose a doctor who has more to offer. Every patient, however unique, deserves to be assessed in the light of the best available knowledge. And the other way around, keen individual observations often lead to innovative insights and add to general knowledge. This interaction between individual experience and general knowledge makes medicine a scientific discipline providing good personalised care. While personalised care seems an innovative concept for biomedical sciences, for general practice it has been recognised as core mission decades ago. And long before evidence-based medicine was defined as ‘the conscientious, explicit, and judicious use of current best evidence in making decisions about the care of individual patients’, general practice already addressed the close interaction between research and patient care. By the same token, for general practice it is evident that there is a continuum between patient and context, medical and psychosocial insights, clinical guidelines and tailormade care, and genome and environment, and that a multidisciplinary endeavour is needed to bring all this together to ensure high quality care. For academic general practice, these insights imply that research and patient care should match as much as possible regarding research questions, research designs and methods, and implementation of findings. In addition, as organising separate studies for every new piece of the knowledge mosaic is not a sustainable strategy, performing research should as much as possible embedded in practice, serving internal and external validity, and with care quality directly benefitting from the learning environment.