Response

We thank Dr Hancock for sharing the extensive work that he and his colleagues have done on preventive care. We have reviewed the A Lifetime of Prevention report.¹ We believe that cooperation between public health and family medicine on this important topic is needed, as prevention is often neglected in our health care system.

In our article “Update on age-appropriate preventive measures and screening for Canadian primary care providers,”² our aim was to create a simple-to-use tool that could be easily accessed to facilitate prevention and screening at dedicated preventive visits or opportunistically at other visits. When creating this tool, we reviewed multiple prevention guidelines as defined in our article. We developed our tool keeping in mind the national recommendations when appropriate, such as the Canadian Task Force on Preventive Health Care guidelines on cervical screening, to make this tool useful across Canada.

We invite Dr Hancock, colleagues, and any Canadian Family Physician readers who would want to have a discussion about prevention to meet at the upcoming Family Medicine Forum in Vancouver, BC, in November 2016. This would be a wonderful opportunity to promote a partnership between provinces and disciplines.

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