Will economic considerations kill primary care?

Lucan-based GP Dr Tony Feeney laments the industrialisation of the delivery of primary care and what he perceives as an official policy of unfairly treating general practitioners by failing to engage with them.   In the 1990s, with the fall of Communism, I visited a hospital in Croatia that I had known as a student. The morning began with large numbers of patients congregating in the hospital lobby, where a team of triage nurses redirected them to the various specialty departments on the basis of their complaints; those with coughs were sent to the Respiratory Unit, sore limbs to Orthopaedics…