Marey Dodoo, Martin Roland, and Larry A. Green
Primary care is now acknowledged to be a foundation of effective, sustainable health care for populations, with favorable effects on access to care, comprehensiveness, continuity, efficiency, and equity. In addition, variation in health care arrangements and policies across nations presents opportunities to compare and learn across national boundaries about what is working and how well in primary care.
It would be advantageous for key U.S. organizations devoted to optimizing primary care to sustain for the foreseeable future exchanges with other countries to enable the United States to see itself more clearly, import innovations of relevance, and elude avoidable mistakes. While there is much to learn in many countries, U.K.-U.S. exchanges present immediate opportunities with particularly great relevance. It is not as if there is little to learn from one another. Rather, it is how much can be learned that can find prompt application in the redesign of primary care that is underway.
Dodoo M, Roland M, Green LA. UK lessons for US primary care. Ann Fam Med 2005;3:561-562.