ABSTRACT
The development of formalised training of family physicians and of family medicine educational curricula in medical schools dominated family medicine enterprises during the 1960s and 1970s, crowding out attention to research until the 1980s. Most family medicine and primary care researchers would identify as most salient what they are working on. Perhaps most would agree that health services research focused on developing the patient-centred medical home, its 'neighbourhood' and its proper financing are major foci of research activity. In response to several reports from the US Institute of Medicine, there is substantial research focused on integrating primary care with behavioural health. A big challenge is confusion about roles in a chaotic aggregation of fragments of healthcare services, and another is the lack of a parsimonious, widely accepted set of measures that actually matter to patients and frontline clinicians – to guide improvement research.
