FAMILY MEDICINE
WELCOME TO THE OFFICIAL WEBSITE OF FAMILY MEDICINE IN NIGERIA.
There are over 20,000 General Duty doctors providing clinical care at the primary care level in Nigeria. But very few of them have received any formal training in general practice. And fewer still have opportunity for continuous updating of the knowledge and skills necessary to provide optimum care in this current dispensation. This scenario partly explains the high level of preventable morbidity and mortality due to common ailments. Some of the clinicians engage in excessive referrals because they are not confident in handling cases with even the slightest complications. Several poor but discerning patients avoid these first contact health facilities and end up visiting multispeciality hospitals where health care costs are very high, with the risk of becoming poorer!
A “Family Physician” is a multi-competent specialist who is trained to provide comprehensive health care both at first contact and in continuity. The number of “Family Physicians” (that is, doctors satisfying the above definition) in Nigeria is grossly inadequate to cater for the huge and rapidly increasing population. It is with the above scenario in mind that the Faculty of Family Medicine of the National Postgraduate Medical College of Nigeria (NPMCN) started the 18 – month course leading to the Postgraduate Diploma in Family Medicine.
Family Medicine is the medical specialty that provides comprehensive, continuing coordinated and compassionate care to individual irrespective of age, sex, diseases, state of health or illness. It is a discipline that has integrated the essentials of several medical specialities into a new whole which it now uses to deliver primary and secondary care in a unique manner. Its approach to patient care is holistic, seeing the individual in his own totality and in the context of his family and community.