WONCA Publications

This book provides practical information about depression and anxiety in primary care, with a focus on the approach in different countries and incorporating global ranges/prevalence, risk factors and health burden including that associated with COVID-19 and its pandemic.

To ensure the challenges of a wide international primary care community are reflected fully, authors from different world regions – Africa, Asia Pacific, East Mediterranean, Europe, IberoAmericana-CIMF, North America and South Asia – have co-contributed to individual chapters on the detection and management of depression and anxiety in primary care in their own countries, including the screening tools used, how widely these tools are adopted and by whom, and current policies. As well as the medical model, it also presents the alternative viewpoint that feeling low or anxious is part of the human condition and the attention should be on supporting people in their journey through life, struggling to deal with the mainly social challenges they meet, rather than defining these problems as disorders or diseases requiring identification and treatment.

Key Features:

• Explores the instruments used for the detection of depression and anxiety in primary care in various countries, and why and how these instruments are being used.
• Describes the pharmaceutical and non-drug interventions for treating depression and anxiety in primary care and compares the similarities and differences in detecting and managing depression and anxiety in primary care among different countries.
• Includes in-depth regional examples of how screening tools are used in practice and how policies can be established in the management of depression and anxiety in primary care.
• Concludes with lessons learned from various countries and from different stakeholders with clear advice on what to do and, importantly, what not to do.

Addressing primary care detection and management of mental health issues across the globe, the book will be an invaluable practical aid for family medicine practitioners and the wider primary and community care teams and a useful reference for those involved in policy setting at regional and national levels including ministries of health.

It has been recognised by governments and healthcare organisations worldwide that for Universal Healthcare in pursuit of Health for All under the Sustainable Development Goals to be achieved, effective primary care that is integrated, accessible, and affordable for everyone is essential.

This practical guide is the first designed specifically to support those planning and conducting family medicine/primary care education within medical schools around the world. It offers medical educators a collection of concise easy to follow chapters, guiding the reader through the curriculum requirements with key references for further detail. Plain English and practical, deliverable advice, adaptable to different contexts, ensures the content is accessible to those educating medical students in any country, while the structure within sections ensures that family medicine doctors and educators can dip into chapters relevant to their roles, for example curriculum design for academic educators or teaching methods for those educating in clinical practice.

Key Features:

• The first “how-to” guide dedicated to effective integration of family medicine teaching into medical school curricula.
• Offers a strong evidence-based framework for integrating family medicine into medical schools.
• Wide in scope, for academics and educationalists at all levels and in all geographies, reflecting and embracing the experience and variation in family medicine across the globe to produce pragmatic and effective information on which medical schools can base change.
• Step-by-step introduction to the processes of literature review (establishing the existing knowledge base), choosing a topic, research questions, and methodology, conducting research, and disseminating results.
• Supported by the WONCA Working Party on Education.

The book is edited and authored by members of the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) Working Party on Education, which is ideally placed to offer a strong platform for medical schools to integrate family medicine whatever the local context, enabling all future doctors, whatever their career aspiration, to understand the importance of family medicine to health systems and holistic medicine and encourage family medicine doctors to inspire students to consider a career in the field.

This third edition of the International Classification of Primary Care (ICPC-3) is indispensible for anyone wishing to use the international classification system for classification of morbidity data in a primary care setting. Distilling the many standards that are applied internationally in primary & community care and public health to offer a telescopic view, the classification has been completely rewritten to reflect the continued shift in the health paradigm of primary care and public health towards the person rather than the disease or provider. The content of ICPC-3 remains closely ‘linked’ to relevant related international classifications. The ICPC-3 also contributes to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, specifically to Goal 3 and its target of ensuring healthy lives and promoting well-being for all at all ages.

Primary care is a rapidly growing academic branch of learning and developing its own body of research is the hallmark of a maturing academic discipline. This practical guide is the first designed specifically to support those planning, conducting and disseminating primary care educational research. While research informs clinical practice, organisation of primary care services and teaching the discipline, educational practices and modes of delivery are rapidly changing, particularly in response to new information technologies. Primary care practitioners must be engaged in life-long learning and keep abreast of developments in many arenas and educational research into how to address this has thus become of paramount importance.

Key Features:

• The first ‘how-to’ guide to designing, conducting and disseminating primary care educational research.
• Focus on inter-professional education, co-design and participatory research approaches, in line with current primary care models of care involving inter-disciplinary teams.
• Wide in scope, exploring the current research environment in the contexts of undergraduate teaching, postgraduate training, continuing professional development, and patient education, for academics and educationalists at all levels.
• Step-by-step introduction to the processes of literature review (establishing the existing knowledge base), choosing a topic, research questions and methodology, conducting research and disseminating results.
• Supported by the WONCA Working Parties on Research and Education.

This book will encourage and upskill academics at universities and institutions teaching primary care in both undergraduate and postgraduate settings, providing support and guidance on how to conduct their own research and evaluate their own programmes, and will help to grow academic research in this discipline in high and, importantly, also low- and middle-income countries.

This book provides up-to-date, practical information for family doctors on how to assess and manage important mental health problems presenting in primary care settings.

Patients frequently present with mental health problems in primary care settings around the world, yet family doctors consistently identify gaps in their knowledge, skills and confidence in how best to care for them. Contributors to the book are experts in primary mental health care and have consulted with family doctors around the world, to identify their main learning needs. Each of the nine core chapters will begin with a set of key points on ‘how to do it’ and will end with educational material in the form of clinical scenarios and multiple choice questions. This book describes core competencies for primary mental health care, clarifies how to conduct a first consultation about depression, reviews non-drug interventions for common mental health problems, discusses the management of unexplained physical symptoms, and advises on the physical health care of patients with severe mental illness. It explores the mental health needs of migrants and young people, and explains how to manage problems of frailty, multimorbidity and dementia.

This book will be of interest to family doctors and students specialising in family medicine worldwide.

In this time of large-scale global migration at levels unrivalled since World War II, primary care practitioners are providing the first line of care to economic migrants and refugees. In doing so, they face daily the considerable challenges that this heterogenic group brings in terms of communication, culture, and legal status as well as physical and mental health.

This accessible book has been carefully crafted to enable primary health care professionals to develop the skills and competencies required to deliver appropriate services to this diverse group of patients and, in turn, to ensure equity in health care for all.

The book satisfies the urgent need for a hands-on guide to support and help general practitioners and other members of the primary health care team improve their provision of care not only to immigrants, but to other vulnerable groups and the whole society.

This joint publication from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) provides a concise analysis of the state of family practice in the 22 countries spread over North Africa, the Middle East and Western Asia, i.e. the Eastern Mediterranean Region (EMR) in both English and Arabic. It shares perspectives and advice from global and regional leaders on how family practice can be introduced and strengthened in high-, middle- and low-income countries.

This is the first book to analyze in depth the current causes of shortage of family physicians and the relative weakness of the family practice model in many countries in the Eastern Mediterranean Region. Focusing on engagement with the private health sector in scaling up family practice, the book explores why primary health care can make the difference and how it can be introduced and strengthened. Comparative experiences from around the world put the EMR in context, while the book also highlights where the EMR is special – in particular, the burden for health care of refugees and displaced persons, and the need of public-private partnerships.

This unique book is the first to bring together primary care experiences from around the world, with emphasis on non-Western regions. Utilising published articles that profile different countries’ primary health care, accompanied by expert commentaries, the book consolidates global primary health care information over the past decade. Profiling the different countries’ primary health care systems and their implementation of primary health care policy, as promoted by WHO and WONCA, the guide provides evidence of how countries and regions can introduce primary health care and family practice to improve their health care infrastructure and delivery. The book is essential reading for policy makers, health educators and academic leaders in primary care and students of global health and provides useful background for those entering or established in clinical family practice around the world.

This practical ‘How To’ guide talks the reader step-by-step through designing, conducting and disseminating primary care research, a growing discipline internationally. The vast majority of health care issues are experienced by people in community settings, who are not adequately represented by hospital-based research. There is therefore a great need to upskill family physicians and other primary care workers and academics to conduct community-based research to inform best practice. Aimed at emerging researchers, including those in developing countries, this book also addresses cutting edge and newly developing research methods, which will be of equal interest to more experienced researchers.

International Perspectives on Primary Care Research examines how the evidence base from primary care research can strengthen health care services and delivery, tackle the growing burden of disease, improve quality and safety, and increase a person-centred focus to health care.

Demonstrating the inter-professional nature of the discipline, the book also features a section on cross-nation organisations and primary care networks supporting research. National perspectives are offered from researchers in 20 countries that form part of the World Organization of Family Doctors, providing case histories from research-rich to resource-poor nations that illustrate the range of research development and capacity building.

This book argues the importance of primary care research, especially to policy makers, decision makers and funders in informing best practice, training primary health care providers and achieving equitable distribution of care.

Containing papers carefully compiled for both their historical importance and contemporary relevance, Family Medicine: The Classic Papers brings together a team of experts, led by global family medicine leaders Michael Kidd, Iona Heath and Amanda Howe, who explain the importance of each selected paper and how it contributes to international health care, current practice and research.

The papers demonstrate the broad scope of primary health care delivered by family doctors around the world, showcasing some of the most important research ever carried out in family medicine and primary care. This unique volume will serve as an inspiration to current family doctors and family medicine researchers and educators, as well as to doctors in training, medical students and emerging researchers in family medicine.

This guidebook systematically analyses the contribution of family medicine to high-quality primary health care in addressing the challenges faced by current health systems, and provides options for moving forward. It serves as a pragmatic guide to potential strategies for putting in place family care teams which effectively contribute to health sector development within a variety of contexts.

From the Foreword by Dr Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization: "...the quest to maintain and improve the health and well-being of people throughout the world is enriching. It adds substantial meaning to the lives of those who contribute to a process that joins the human family in a common undertaking based on intrinsic respect for the dignity of each individual. The roots of this process run as deep as humanity's oldest efforts to alleviate suffering, yet they are nourished by the approaches described in the following pages that draw on current developments in education and patient care, recent epidemiological research, and ongoing examples of successful implementation among diverse communities throughout the world."

From the Executive Summary: The much anticipated second edition of this guidebook reveals ways in which family medicine can help countries throughout the world maintain and improve health and well-being by developing a more productive, coordinated and cost-effective approach to health care. It describes: the rationale for structuring health systems to be more responsive to the needs of people; a vision of optimal health services delivery based on primary health care; challenges to achieving this vision; family medicine's response to these challenges; and strategies for developing and strengthening family practice within countries.

It provides practical inspirational reading for family doctors and family medicine academics, health care managers, policy makers and shapers, and public health and primary health care academics and professionals who will benefit greatly from implementing the flexible, local level options presented to the benefit of the people of their communities and their nations.

The aim of the book is to profile ordinary family doctors around the world who are interested or involved in environmental issues.

Launched in 2014, and consisting of 71 chapters written by 74 authors, it represents a unique collaboration, with contributions from every continent. It is intended to be a free resource for doctors, educators and others wanting to obtain practical ideas on implementing aspects of rural medical education and to learn from the experience of colleagues in different contexts. The project has been proudly supported by WONCA through the WONCA Working Party on Rural Practice, the Northern Ontario School of Medicine, Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN), and the Rockefeller Foundation.

A joint publication by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA) to promote the vision of primary care for mental health. It reaffirms the urgent importance and advantage of redressing the limited vision, presents the justification, advice and advantages of providing mental health services into primary care systems around the world. It describes how a range of health systems have successfully undertaken this transformation.