A family doctor has many important attributes including taking responsibility for patients and their families, showing compassion, being curious and enthusiastic, having strong clinical and diagnostic skills, managing chronic illnesses and multiple health problems, coordinating care, educating patients, and having good interpersonal and communication skills. They provide higher quality, more cost-effective and comprehensive care than specialists. Home visits allow family doctors to better understand patients and identify new health issues.

1. Attributes of a Family Doctor
Prof Faisal Abdul-Latif Alnasir
FPC,MICGP,FRCGP,PhD

2. Attributes of the Family Physician
1. Sense of responsibility for individual and the family.
2. Compassion and empathy.
3. A curious attitude.
4. Enthusiasm.
5. Interest in clinical medicine.
6. Ability to deal comfortably with multiple problems.
7. Intellectual and technical challenges.

3. Attributes of the Family Physician
8. Ability to support children.
9. Ability to assist patients in coping with everyday
problems.
10. Coordinator of all health resources needed.
11. Identify problems at the earliest.

4. Attributes of the Family Physician
12. Maintain patient satisfaction.
13. Manage chronic illness.
14. Appreciation for the complex mix of physical,
emotional, and social elements.
15. Commitment to educating patients.

5. Quality of Care
Primary care physician is to provide higher quality of
care than that provided by other physicians.
McGann and Bowman (1990) compared morbidity and
mortality of patients hospitalized by family physicians
and internists. They found that even though the family
physicians’ patients were older and more severely ill,
there was no significant difference in morbidity and
mortality.

6. Primary care is a specialty , to be done well, requires
extensive training specifically tailored to problems
frequently seen by physicians in ambulatory care.

7. Cost-Effective Care
Care provided is more economical.
The nature of the problems could be assessed more
rapidly and accurately. Because of the intimate,
ongoing relationship, the family physicians are in under
less pressure to exclude diagnostic possibilities by use
of expensive laboratory and radiological procedures.

8. Cost-Effective Care
Internists were 1.7 times more likely to hospitalize
patients than family physicians and 1.3 times more likely
to refer.
Family physicians order fewer tests.
Cherkun and associates (1987)

9. Comprehensive Care
The family physician must be comprehensively trained
to acquire all the medical skills necessary to care for the
majority of patient problems.

10. Comprehensive Care
The greater the number of skills omitted from the family
physician’s training and practice, the more frequent is
the need to refer minor problems to another physician.

11. Comprehensive Care
A truly comprehensive primary care physician
adequately manages acute infections, treats
musculoskeletal sprains and minor fractures, removes
foreign bodies, treats vaginitis, provides obstetric care,
and care for the newborn infant, gives supportive
psychotherapy, and supervises or performs diagnostic
procedures.

12. Comprehensive Care
The needs management of an illness involves much
more than a diagnosis, it requires consideration of
religious beliefs; social, economic or cultural problems;
personal expectations; and heredity, spiritual,
intellectual, emotional, social, ad economic factors.

13. Comprehensive Care
A physician specializing in only one discipline will have a
much shallower base in comprehensive medicine and a
much greater depth in the chosen discipline. The sub-
specialist is an excellent consultant but is not trained
and cannot function effectively as a primary generalist.

14. Comprehensive Care
The family physician’s ability to confront relatively large
numbers of unselected patients with undifferentiated
conditions is a unique primary care skill.

15. Interpersonal Skills
One of the foremost skills of family physician is the
ability to effectively utilize the knowledge of
interpersonal relation in the management of patients.
Good interpersonal skills enhanced by compassion
enable the physician to dissect out the tangled mass of
personal difficulties that so often form the core of
functional disease or magnify the symptoms of an
organic condition.

16. Interpersonal Skills
The patient should be viewed compassionately as
a person in distress, who needs to be treated with
concern, dignity, and personal consideration.

17. Interpersonal Skills
To relate well to patients, a physician must develop
compassion and courtesy, the ability to establish rapport
and to communicate effectively, the ability to gather
information rapidly and to organize it logically, the skills
required to identify all significant patient problems and to
manage these problems appropriately, the ability to
listen, the skills necessary to motivate people, and the
ability to observe and detect nonverbal clues.

18. Accessibility
The feeling of security that the patient gains just by
knowing that he or she can “touch” the physician, either
in person or by phone, is in itself therapeutic and has a
comforting and calming influence.
When primary care is not available, many individuals
turn to hospital.

19. Diagnostic Skills
The family physician must be an outstanding
diagnostician. Since problems are usually seen in
their early.

20. Diagnostic Skills
Diagnosis are made on probability, and the likelihood
that disease present frequently, approximately one
fourth of all patient seen will never be assigned a final,
definitive diagnosis. The family physician is an expert in
the rapid assessment of a problem presented for the
first time.

21. Diagnostic Skills
The family physician must be able to evaluate
symptoms, verbal and nonverbal communication, and
early signs of illness in order to make the diagnosis.
Each patient’s problem has an emotional component, a
patient’s personality fears, and anxieties play a role in
every illness.

22. Home care
A valuable tool to develop a trough understanding of
the patients and their environments.
Ramsdell and Coworkers (1989) “Home visit
assessments reveals two new problems and up to
eight new treatment recommendations”

23. Home care
Home visit is the only way to:
•Identify environmental hazards
•Evaluate functional status
•Detect neglect
•Compliance/None to prescription
•Family reaction to illness

24. Thank you