General practice needs resolute and united medical leadership to ensure its fitness for survival
Two-hundred years after the birth of Charles Darwin and 150 years after the publication of On the origin of species, we elected to pursue a Darwinian theme in the 2009 MJA annual General Practice issue. “Survival of the fittest” relates to the ability to adapt to the immediate environment, which, for medicine and health care, has certainly undergone some changes! Indeed, the Lancet recently redefined health as the ability to adapt.1 We wanted to explore just how medicine, and general practice in particular, has adapted to changing societal, commercial and political environments.
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- The Medical Journal of Australia, Sydney, NSW.
- 1. What is health? The ability to adapt [editorial]. Lancet 2009; 373: 781.
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