ABSTRACT
General practitioners (GPs) have a crucial role to play in promoting health and preventing disease, in consultation with the individual patient, through planned activities such as vaccinations, cervical smears, blood pressure monitoring and through their role in the wider primary healthcare team. Public health can be said to encompass three domains of practice: improving services, health protection and the investigation and control of outbreaks and health improvement, which includes the promotion of good health. The future role of GPs is likely to involve a far greater relationship with public health priorities and initiatives than has been seen before, particularly in relation to practice-based commissioning and health improvement. Public health training can, as one trainer put it, help GPs to gain a population perspective of healthcare provision. Continuing medical education can be broadly defined as formal educational events designed to maintain, update or improve professional practice.
