This work adopts a modern approach to quality assurance and quality improvement in general practice. It provides an introduction to the subject, enabling readers to see how best to proceed in their own practices. It revises and updates previous books by Donald and Sally Irvine on clinical audit by placing audit within the wider quality context. It is designed to provide an easily accessible approach to the basic tenets as well as speculating on the future developments in this area, and should be of interest to all members of the practice team. The themes of the book are illustrated by reference to the five major case studies provided, which describe in some detail the various ways of starting, implementing and maintaining quality assurance in general practice today. Practical examples of Total Quality Management, the use of British Standard 5750, Kings Fund organizational audit, Investors in People, and Fellowship of the Royal College of General Practitioners by assessment, are also provided. These studies are written by the practitioners, medical and non-medical, who have themselves been through the experience of turning theory into practice.

What are the dynamics that shape a primary care team? How can difficult issues be tackled when aiming towards the government's strategies? This book shows how good governance and quality management in general practice can be achieved. It addresses difficult issues, such as power, leadership, interpersonal behavior, confrontation, accountability and handling conflict, and looks at the dynamics of both groups and individuals, and investigates ways of dealing with them. It provides practical solutions, questions to help the reader analyze problems and test their performance, case studies and real examples drawn from the authors' many years experience in diagnostic management consultancy. It is essential reading for all members of the new primary care organizations, especially GPs, practice managers and nurses.

Cinema and medicine have been inextricably linked since the earliest days of film, with doctors appearing in fictional films before criminals, the clergy or even cowboys. But why have healthcare professionals - often played by major stars - featured so prominently in film history, and what does this have to tell us now? Responding to Alexander, Lenahan and Pavlov's Cinemeducation (Radcliffe, 2005) which focused on the uses of cinema in medical teaching, this book instead examines what film has to say about medicine, its practitioners, and their cultural meaning. Drawing on a miscellany of films from the dawn of cinema to the 2000s, from horror and westerns to war films and art cinema, and informed by a film and cultural studies-based approach, this will be a valuable text for students of medical or film history, researchers in the medical humanities, and medical practitioners with an interest in the portrayal and cultural representation of their profession.

"The Other Side of Medicine" is an amusing and challenging reflection of changes and fashions in general practice. Covering various themes including humanity in medicine, communication, and quality assessment of doctors, Peter Tate offers an abundance of personal anecdotes and patient perspectives. Doctors, particularly general practitioners, their trainers and examiners, and medical students will find this romp through a half century of medical life invigorating and invaluable. "This book is a collection of articles and short stories covering a medical career. Some are iconoclastic, the theme of good communication in medicine runs throughout, other themes are quality in doctors and the assessment of that quality but I hope the main strand of the book is humanity in medicine and my attempts at understanding what that is." - Peter Tate, in the Preface.