Your report (Seeing same GP ‘improves patient health and cuts workload of doctors’, 23 February) is welcome yet rather overdue: experienced practitioners in previous decades always knew that continuity of care was an essential cornerstone to building the art and ethos of their community and vocational work. As the Victorian-era physician William Osler counselled: “It is much more important to know what sort of patient has a disease than what sort of disease a patient has.”
This should be especially true for GPs: not only for the technical aspects of diagnosis and treatment, but even more for the human skills of containment, comfort, guidance and knowledgable support – the art of care, which accounts for so much of a practitioner’s therapeutic influence.
