Multilingual education: medical interns perceptions regarding the usefulness of non-mother tongue communications skills taught during the undergraduate curriculum.

Background: This paper investigates the perceptions of medical interns regarding the usefulness of non-mother tongue communication skills taught during the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. In 2003, the university decided to incorporate Afrikaans and IsiXhosa communication skills into the new MBChB curriculum in order to meet the Faculty of Health Sciences goals to promote quality and equity in healthcare, and to prepare graduating health practitioners for multilingual communities where they would be serving. Despite annual internal evaluations and reviews of the languages courses, the usefulness, if any, of the additional languages in the working clinical environment had not been determined.

A framework for implementation of community-orientated primary care in the Metro Health Services, Cape Town, South Africa.

In South Africa, the national policy on re-engineering primary health care (PHC) supports the implementation of ward-based outreach teams with community health workers. In the Western Cape, a community-orientated primary care (COPC) approach has been adopted in provincial goals for 2030 and the key strategies for the improvement of district health services. This approach is expected to improve health and also save costs.

Training family physicians: A qualitative exploration of experiences of registrars in a family medicine training programme in Cape Town, South Africa.

Background: The MMed in Family Medicine is a professional Master's qualification spanning 4 years of training. The outcomes were predetermined by national consensus. While these outcomes are measured in the form of a national exit examination, there has been no exploration of the experiences of registrars (residents) in this relatively new programme.

Development and validation of a tool to measure patient experience in chronic disease care.

Background:  There is a global increase in the prevalence of non-communicable diseases and a growing understanding that patients need to be involved in their care. Patient experience should be assessed and the information used to improve on the planning and delivery of health services.

Aim:  This study described the development and validation of a patient-reported experience measure (PREM) tool which is appropriate for the South African context, to assess self-reported patient experience of chronic care.

Strengths and limitations of a family physician.

Family physicians (FP) practising in different parts of the world may require different sets of knowledge and skills to satisfy the needs of the communities in which they work as well as the requirements of the professional bodies with which they are registered. This article gives an overview of the strengths and limitations of the FP globally and more specifically within India, South Africa, and the United States of America. The historical context and evolution of FM as a clinical and academic discipline is discussed in this article.

Building freeways: piloting communication skills in additional languages to health service personnel in Cape Town, South Africa.

Background: This study reflects on the development and teaching of communication skills courses in additional national languages to health care staff within two primary health care facilities in Cape Town, South Africa. These courses were aimed at addressing the language disparities that recent research has identified globally between patients and health care staff. Communication skills courses were offered to staff at two Metropolitan District Health Services clinics to strengthen patient access to health care services.

Profile and anticoagulation outcomes of patients on warfarin therapy in an urban hospital in Cape Town, South Africa.

Background: Warfarin is the most frequently used oral anticoagulant worldwide and it is the oral anticoagulant of choice in South Africa for reducing thrombosis-related morbidity and mortality. However, the safety and efficacy of warfarin therapy depends mainly on careful monitoring and maintenance of the international normalised ratio (INR) within an optimal therapeutic range.

Aim: The aim of this study was to describe the profile and the anticoagulation outcomes of patients on warfarin therapy in a major warfarin clinic in the Western Cape Province of South Africa.

Western Cape Primary Care Assessment Tool (PCAT) study: Measuring primary care organisation and performance in the Western Cape Province, South Africa (2013).

Background: Major health sector reform and the need for baseline measures of performance to determine impact.

Aim: Baseline audit of primary healthcare (PHC) performance.

Setting: Cape Town and Cape Winelands (rural) PHC facilities (PCFs) in Western Cape Province, South Africa.

Diabetes mellitus and non-traumatic lower extremity amputations in four public sector hospitals in Cape Town, South Africa, during 2009 and 2010.

Background: Diabetes mellitus (DM) is the most commonly reported cause of non-trauma-related lower extremity amputations (LEAs) worldwide, but there is a dearth of such information for South Africa (SA).

Objectives: To examine the proportion of LEAs due to diabetes and to describe the associated characteristics of these patients.

Methods: A retrospective analysis of all LEAs was performed in four public sector hospitals in Cape Town, SA, for 2009 and 2010.

Health Sciences undergraduate education at UCT: a story of transformation.

Undergraduate education and training in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town has become socially responsive. A story of transformation that is consonant with wider societal developments since the 1994 democratic elections, outlining the changes in undergraduate curricula across the faculty, is presented.

Developing family medicine in South africa: a new and important step for medical education.

The announcement by the National Ministry of Health on the 17th August 2007 (South African Government 2007), officially recognizing family medicine as a speciality in its own right is an indication of just how far 'general practice' has developed in South Africa. From January 2008 there is to be a compulsory, full-time four- year training programme for registrars in Family Medicine which should result in a well trained cohort of Family Physicians suitable to staff Community Health Centres and Primary Care Hospitals in the future. This article seeks to explore some of the milestones reached in the development of the community of family medicine professionals and teachers, the roles taken by the major protagonists in the development and the way that medical education can promote and sustain the discipline.

Family medicine in South Africa: where are we now and where do we want to be?

Objectives: This paper outlines the development of family medicine in South Africa with special reference to the process leading to the recognition of this discipline as a medical specialty. It also examines the constraints under which the discipline has had to function, considers where the discipline should be, seeks to identify the barriers to its further development and suggests ways in which to overcome these.

Methods: A short review was carried out of the available South African literature to record the advancement of the discipline and the international literature was searched for articles supporting this direction.