GATEKEEPER A medical professional who provides primary care for patients and whose referral is necessary for obtaining secondary care paid for by the public or an insurance.
GENERAL POPULATION Refers to the total population including all persons irrespective of the state of their health. Consists both of the healthy population and the patient population.
GENERAL PRACTICE (Syn: family medicine) A medical speciality which deals with unselected health problems in individuals and families and is the first contact to the medical profession in the health care system.
GENERAL PRACTITIONER AND FAMILY DOCTOR. Synonyms, used to describe those doctors who have undergone postgraduate training in general practice.
GENERAL PRACTITIONER See FAMILY PHYSICIAN.
GENERATIVE LEARNING (aka Double Loop) Learning that leads to redefinition of the original goals, norms, policies, procedures or even structures.
GENERIC Used in relation to health outcome it means a general health outcome measure rather than a disease specific. See also FUNCTIONAL STATUS INDEX.
GLOSSARY (Syn: vocabulary) List of technical or special words explaining their meanings.
GOLD STANDARD This term has two meanings: 1. A term which describes the optimal structure, procedure or outcome of the general practitioner's professional work. Often used to indicate what by peers are regarded as good professional standard in general practice. As such it acts as the ruler with which a given structure, procedure or outcome is compared when estimating the QUALITY OF CARE. 2. A diagnostic procedure that is considered as conclusive evidence for the presence of a health problem. See also AUDIT.
GOOD TEACHING A quality of teaching that is more than adequate, although not necessarily outstanding. It is alsothe the threshold that all educators are expected to achieve, regardless of their context or disclipinary home
GP WITH SPECIAL INTEREST (GpwSIs) A GP who has undertaken additional specialist training for certain clinical conditions who is qualified to assess and treat patients who would normally be referred in the first instance to a consultant.
GPC: General Practitioners Committee of the British Medical Association
GPStR GP specialist training registrar (or ST3)
GROUNDED THEORY A theory that is discovered, developed and provisionally verified from data that have been gained systematically and analysed during the course of research.
GROUP PRACTICE (Syn: associated practice) A practice in which the patient population is cared for by a number of associated/affiliated physicians. The principal responsibility for sub-groups of the population may be assigned to one or more physicians, but the group accepts the responsibility for continuity of patient care. In a legal sense, however, the individual physician usually has the ultimate responsibility for each patient. 1. Single-speciality group: A group practice in which all physician members belong to the same speciality. 2. Multi-speciality group (Syn: Polyclinic): A group practice in which the physician members belong to more than one speciality.
GROUP TUTORIAL . Any problems students have to solve as a selected group
GUIDELINE: Advice on health care management based on a set of national or local standards which have general professional support. A guideline is often produced by experts and reflects the literature and current best practice. It is agreed guidance written down to set a standard or to determine a course of action
GUM: Genito-Urinary medicine The branch of medicine that deals with sexually transmitted infections.
GUTTMAN SCALE A cumulative scale in which each item consists of increasingly more severe or extreme items (Can you climb the stairs? Can you walk a km?). In a perfect Guttman Scale, each person's response to items in the scale can be determined from the total scale score.