ABSTRACT
Family medicine is a relatively young academic discipline in Turkey. Primary care services were exclusively provided by medical graduates with no vocational training up until 1985, when the first training positions in family medicine became available at tertiary teaching hospitals. Currently, there are 63 departments of family medicine all over the country that play an active role in both undergraduate and postgraduate medical teaching. Several regional and national family medicine meetings, which act as platforms for the presentation of primary care research, take place on a regular basis. Medical graduates with no vocational training still provide more than 90" of primary care services and have limited research capacity. Additional challenges to primary care research include a lack of funding, bureaucratic obstacles to accessing primary care data and few academic primary care centres. The development of academic family medicine departments within the last 20 years is at a level comparable with many countries in Europe.
