Rural health turned upside-down

The UK needs to revitalise metropolitan medicine as Australia has done for rural medicine

With over half of the world’s population living in cities and towns, one of the great challenges of the 21st century is to define and deliver effective and affordable health and social care to urban populations. In the United Kingdom, this is nowhere more apparent than in the deprived parts of its great metropolitan areas. Here, the ratio of general practitioners to population numbers is significantly lower than the national average, there are more solo-doctor practices, and these practices frequently lack the critical mass required to support a full range of services. Overall, inner-city general practice has been a running sore for the National Health Service. To make matters worse, many of the principals of these practices are within cooee of retiring.