Review

Still very relevant

Building bridges: the future of GP education
Edited by Steve Gillam, John Eversley, Janet Snell and Paul Wallace
King’s Fund, 1999. £12.95

A lot has changed in the five years since this book was published and I wondered whether it could still be relevant. After all, GPs have a new contract, have lost the postgraduate educational allowance and are being appraised (which includes a personal development plan).

But in fact there is a lot of thought-provoking material here, particularly if you weren’t involved in the London Initiative Zone Educational Incentives programme (LIZEI), which forms the centrepiece of the book.

A brief summary of educational principles, a review of LIZEI’s achievements and weaknesses follow an historical introduction. There is then a further review of educational principles, a discussion of attempts to measure the quality of general practice, a mixed bag of ‘views from the key players’ and, finally, a real gem: ‘the route to a better future’.

This last, brief (nine pages) chapter sums up the book’s philosophy, which is still very relevant: the need for ‘a genuine education-service partnership, with reflection and learning arising directly from the reality of the problems presented by patients’. Clearly, if we are to encourage GPs to take a more active role in their own education than they have traditionally done, cooperation between primary care trusts, educators, GPs and patients (who after all have the most to gain) is the way forward.

There were some disappointments. It was often unclear whether contributors were discussing undergraduate education, vocational training or continuing professional development. There was no mention of public health, and it seems sad that a book devoted to building bridges cannot see the part that public health play in furthering primary care education. Nonetheless, this book stands as a useful reminder of the distance still to be travelled, but also of the direction in which we must go. I shall take this book to my clinical governance group and recommend it to them.