ABSTRACT
Traditional teaching disseminated from specialist centres is focused on consultant encounters and the increasing use of new technologies. This educational programming is further underpinned by a natural tendency of specialists to judge people's practice from their perspective. Failing to recognise potentially serious illness in an accurate and efficient fashion can have adverse consequences for the delivery of high quality healthcare. Inaccuracy is about not identifying the true disease state, resulting in false-positive and false-negative diagnoses. In seeking to enhance the accuracy of diagnoses, a range of different interventions have been targeted both at patients and at healthcare professionals. Such approaches can be broadly divided into those focusing on population-based health screening and those designed to enhance the ability of primary care practitioners and patients to recognise and respond appropriately to symptoms or signs. Population-based screening is intuitively attractive, and often it is seen as the obvious first choice for earlier disease recognition.
