Palestine: a week in November

摘要

The Occupied Palestinian Territories (population 4.5 million) has no system of postgraduate training for family practice. Primary care is provided by GPs without specific training and specialists based in the community. The hero of this story, Dr Samar Musmar, is a Palestinian who was trained and licensed as a family practitioner in Florida, and has returned to her first home to build specialist family medicine there. An invitation for her to speak at a Society of Academic Primary Care meeting in 2011 and then at a ‘dangerous ideas’ session at the Royal College of General Practitioners conference in Glasgow in 2012 sparked off a commitment from some UK doctors to support her efforts. With Samar having set up a training programme for 19 primary care doctors, the first step was to plan an intensive 1-week residential course taking place at An-Najah National University, Nablus. The teaching faculty included UK doctors and one intrepid (and much younger) GP from Bologna.