[Graduate and continuing education from the viewpoint of Hamburg general practitioners].

We wanted to investigate the interest and attitudes towards vocational training and continuous medical education (CME) among general practitioners in the city of Hamburg, Germany and carried out an semianonymous postal survey among all general practitioners (GP) in Hamburg excluding those specialised in psychotherapy using a pretested standardised questionnaire, 225 from 740 GP's responded (30%). More ground after vocational training was desired in the fields of "interpersonal competence", social medicine and specific topics from clinical medicine such as dermatology, psychiatry as well as musculosceletal diseases and complaints. Priorities for CME showed some significant differences with regard to gender and age of the GP's.

[General practice quality circles in the large city. Participation by Hamburg general physicians].

Quality circles (peer review) will play an increasing and important role in ambulatory care when they are based on voluntary participation and in a setting of open discussion. Goal is the further qualification of physicians by critical reflections on their practice based on learning processes and the experiences of the participants. Reported are experiences from the unit for primary care and health service research of the Hamburg University on implementing quality circles.

Healthy volunteer effect in a cohort study: temporal resolution in the Adventist Health Study.

The healthy volunteer effect was studied by comparing 6 years of mortality data for 31,124 participants from the Adventist Health Study (AHS) who responded to both a relatively brief census questionnaire (CQ) in 1974 and a detailed life-style questionnaire (LQ) in 1976 (responders), to mortality data for 8,762 individuals who did not respond to the second questionnaire. The rate ratio (RR) comparing LQ nonresponders to responders for all cause mortality decreased from 2.5 (2.

[The role of general practice within the public health care system].

A comparison of general medicine in a de jure (Germany) and de facto (Netherlands, Great Britain) existing structured primary care model describes the present state as well as the pro and contra of the strengthening of the general practitioner (GP) within the primary health care system. For the patient, the better continuity and comprehensiveness of care has to be emphasized. For the patients, who choose to inscribe on a list of a GP, a reduction of health insurance fees is proposed for the German out-patient care system.