information about the French Society of General Medicine
The French_Society_of_General_Medicine (http://www.sfmg.org) is a learned society created in 1973 and its aim is to promote general medicine. This is done by developing concepts in GP, research and continued medical education. SFMG has about 800 members and 3 working groups on cardiovascular disease; 1 on multimorbidity with a lot of disease of the cardiovascular field, 1 on hypertension, and 1 on Type 2 diabetes. Society members are active in research on typologies of patients, using data from the Observatory of General Medicine, the network of SFMG. We are working on the management of multimorbidity because it is now an important part of our clinical activity. The French Society has developed a Consultation Result Dictionary (www.sfmg.org/drc and webdrc.sfmg.org) to describe problems when patients are seen by GPs, and it is linked to ICD-10, ICPC. For 20 years the General Medicine Observatory (http://omg.sfmg.org/), was developed with data collected from the EMR of GPs, like what is done in England with the GPRD. However, it was recently closed because it became too costly for the society We have since a few years a national College of General Medicine on top of GP’s unions, scientific societies and CME associations. There are approximately 53,000 GPs in France with 98% in private practice. This is now beginning to change as young GPs now want to practice in a pluri-professional group with nurse, GP’s and other paramedics. Currently, the remuneration for GPs are fee for service. With introduction of a part of P4P and capitation. French GPs manage a wide range of cardiovascular disease with few limitations in medication and therapy. Guidelines are developed under the responsibility of the High Authority in Health. a state agency and are pluri-professional. All CME associations must promote national guidelines and we do not use any foreign guidelines. For example, the Type 2 Diabetes guideline is quite close to the Nice guideline. ESC guidelines are not used in France. In addition, one fourth of GPs are subscriber to la Revue Prescrire, who has no advertising and who is “tough” with pharmaceutical industries. GPs in France have a real limitation of using English, and the first and second languages are both French.
