How well do Australian medical schools prepare general practitioners to care for patients with mental disorders?

Objective: The purpose of the present paper was to map the mental health workloads of general practitioners (GPs) , and to determine GPs' views of the adequacy of their undergraduate training in psychiatry.

Methods: Twenty-nine GPs who had graduated since 1980 from an Australian medical school provided data on 339 consecutive adult patients with conspicuous psychological disorders. After listing their patients' problems and management plans, doctors rated the value of their undergraduate teaching in preparing them for this task.