ABSTRACT
Ideal humane commitment to patients in general must be transformed into effective concern for real people; the present hierarchy of specialties that relegates primary care, geriatric and psychiatric care to the bottom of the heap shows that this transformation is hardly attempted by medical education, let alone achieved. Only after this phase of social re-education, it is safe to make the partial and the controlled detachment that is absolutely necessary to effective doctoring. Despite having large tracts of deprivation with their attendant poor health indices, the general practice (GP) to patient ratio was 1:2500, comparing poorly with the national ratio of 1:1600. The Irish College of General Practitioners requisitioned the North Dublin City GP Training Scheme (NDCGP) to provide a new module on Social Medicine for its national GP training curriculum. The NDCGP has taken the Social Determinants of Health Model from a peripheral lecture to the core of its educational activities.
