ABSTRACT
Practices are looking outwards to their communities, establishing links and building capacity to help patients live longer and better in the community, preventing, postponing and lessening the complications of multimorbidity. Developing long-term productive relationships continues to be the cornerstone of generalist clinical practice, but increasingly the focus is on building similar relationships with professional colleagues, other services and local communities. With their intrinsic strengths of contact, continuity, coordination, coverage, flexibility and trust, general practices (GP) are the natural hubs of local health systems but need GP leadership for the exceptional potential of the hub role to be realised. One of the privileges of GP and family medicine is the opportunity to look after a whole population or a list of people accessing health care at a particular place: With great effort any doctor can get to know all his patients, even in a city with a high migrant turnover.
