ABSTRACT

This book provides an important contribution to the new and growing field of 'narrative-based medicine'. It specifically addresses the largest area of medical activity primary care. It provides both a theoretical framework and practical skills for dealing with individual consultations family work clinical supervision and teamwork and offers a comprehensive approach to the whole range of work in primary care. Using a wide range of clinical examples it shows how professionals in primary care can help clarify patients' existing stories and elucidate new stories. It can be used as a training resource and includes exercises and summaries of key points to consider. It is based on and describes an established evaluated training method and is of immediate and significant practical use to readers. It is essential reading for general practitioners practice nurses and others in the primary care team psychologists family therapists counsellors and other professionals attached to primary care. GP trainers tutors and course organisers will find it a valuable educational tool. Professionals elsewhere in primary care such as pharmacists dentists and optometrists and academics in medical sociology and medical anthropology will also find it very useful.

chapter 1|10 pages

Introduction

The three kinds of consultation

chapter 2|6 pages

What are we talking about?

chapter 3|12 pages

The key to complexity

systems consultation

chapter 5|12 pages

Theory to practice

principles, guidelines and some rules

chapter 7|22 pages

Consultation as teaching and training

chapter 9|12 pages

Consultation as self-management

consulting with oneself

chapter 10|12 pages

Consulting the client

the patient as specialist

chapter 11|12 pages

Medicine as art, art as medicine

the humanities in healthcare