Learning specialist skills for a generalist discipline

The Craft of Generalism clinical skills and attitudes for whole person care

RATIONALE, AIMS AND OBJECTIVES

Generalists manage a broad range of biomedical and biographical knowledge as part of each clinical encounter, often in multiple encounters over time. The sophistication of this broad integrative work is often misunderstood by those schooled in reductionist or constructivist approaches to evidence. There is a need to describe the practical and philosophically robust ways that understanding about the whole person is formed. In this paper we describe first principles of generalist approaches to knowledge formation in clinical practice. We name the Craft of Generalism.

METHODS

The newly described methodology of Transdisciplinary Generalism is examined by skilled generalist clinicians and translated into skills and attitudes useful for everyday generalist person-centred practice and research.

RESULTS

The Craft of Generalism defines the required scope, process, priorities, and knowledge management skills of all generalists seeking to care for the whole person. These principles are Whole Person Scope, Relational Process, Healing Orientation, and Integrative Wisdom. These skills and attitudes are required for whole person care. If any element of these first principles is left out, the resultant knowledge is incomplete and philosophically incoherent.

CONCLUSIONS

Naming the Craft of Generalism defines the generalist gaze and protects generalism from the colonization of a narrowed medical gaze that excludes all but reductionist evidence or constructivist experience. Defining the Craft of Generalism enables clear teaching of the sophisticated skills and attitudes of the generalist clinician. These philosophically robust principles encourage and defend the use of generalist approaches to knowledge in settings across the community - including health policy, education, and research.

Transdisciplinary Generalism: Naming the epistemology and philosophy of the generalist

BACKGROUND

Transdisciplinary research and generalist practice both face the task of integrating and discerning the value of knowledge across disciplinary and sectoral knowledge cultures. Transdisciplinarity and generalism also both offer philosophical and practical insights into the epistemology, ontology, axiology, and logic of seeing the 'whole'. Although generalism is a skill that can be used in many settings from industry to education, the focus of this paper is the literature of the primary care setting (i.e., general practice or family medicine). Generalist philosophy and practice in the family medicine setting highly values whole person care that uses integrative and interpretive wisdom to include both biomedical and biographical forms of knowledge. Generalist researchers are often caught between reductionist (positivist) biomedical measures and social science (post-positivist) constructivist theories of knowing. Neither of these approaches, even when juxtaposed in mixed-methods research, approximate the complexity of the generalist clinical encounter. A theoretically robust research methodology is needed that acknowledges the complexity of interpreting these ways of knowing in research and clinical practice.

METHODS

A conceptual review of literature to define the alignment between (a) the philosophy and practice of generalism in primary care and (b) both the practical (Zurich) and philosophical or methodological (Nicolescuian) schools of transdisciplinarity.

RESULTS

The alignment between generalism and transdisciplinarity included their broad scope, relational process, complex knowledge management, humble attitude to knowing, and real-world outcome focus.

CONCLUSION

The concurrence between these approaches to knowing is offered here as Transdisciplinary Generalism - a coherent epistemology for both primary care researchers and generalist clinicians to understand, enact, and research their own sophisticated craft of managing diverse forms of knowledge.

Distilling the essence of general practice: a learning journey in progress

Over the past 5 years, general practice in the UK has undergone major change. Starting with the introduction of the new GMS contract in 2004, it has continued apace with the establishment of Postgraduate Medical Education Training Board, a GP training curriculum, and nMRCGP. The NHS is developing very differently in the four countries of the UK. Regulation of the profession is under review, and a system of relicensing, recertification, and revalidation is being introduced. The Essence project, initiated by RCGP Scotland in conjunction with International Futures Forum 4 years ago is a constructive response to these changes. It has included learning journeys, a discussion day for GPs, and commissioned short pieces of 100 words from GPs and patients. From an analysis of these, some characteristics of the essence of general practice have been defined. These include key roles and core personal qualities for GPs. It is argued that general practice has important and unique advantages - trust, coordination, continuity, flexibility, universal coverage, and leadership - which mean that it should continue to be central to the development of primary care throughout the UK.