Regarding palliative care

As a third-year medical student and future family physician with a focused area of practice in sports medicine, I have to say that extra training in family-related fields is clearly a must these days. There are 3 facets of focused areas of practice that particularly interest students:

1. Many medical students who plan to do family medicine would like to do extra training.

2. A focused area of practice in family medicine equals better quality in that specific area of family medicine.

3. The family practitioner group model of practice is growing all across Canada. New medical students are learning the importance of having an area of focused practice and what it can do to increase the general knowledge of a multidisciplinary group of physicians and other health care workers.

Having members with focused areas of practice allows the health care group to have a consulting service by the most knowledgeable physician in that area, who then furthers opportunities for group learning by discussing the cases at team meetings.

Having read both sides of the debate, I think that Dr Vinay doesn’t offer much of a strong argument against palliative care as a specialty.1 Specifically, to say that we will rally exclusively to those physicians with a focused area of practice is not a strong enough argument. If this debate occurred 10 to 20 years ago, then yes, the issue would be totally different. But now, medicine is increasingly multidisciplinary. More than ever, we need to work together as a team in managing the whole spectrum of our patients’ needs.

Bottom line: we need to work as a team of health professionals and understand our limits. Family medicine physicians are known as the expert generalists of all fields equally. Realistically, this means we individually have some areas of practice that we are less comfortable with, and others in which we are more proficient.

Family medicine–focused areas of training are necessary to enhance our knowledge in particular fields, whether they be palliative care, sports medicine, geriatrics, obstetrics, or any other areas of care. In the end, this will work toward increasing the quality of care delivered to our patients.

• Copyright© the College of Family Physicians of Canada