Many barriers and facilitators were identified. The primary palliative care toolkit can help community-based palliative care services to be established nationally.

No abstract

Family medicine is undergoing dramatic transformation around the world. Its organisation, delivery, and funding are changing in profound ways. While the specifics of primary care reform vary, a common emerging strategy involves establishment of primary health care teams that provide improved access, use electronic records, are networked with other teams, and are paid using blended payment schemes. More family doctors are needed in all countries. New approaches beyond the traditional apprenticeships or residency programs will be required to meet global demand. Training of family doctors must change to prepare tomorrow's family physician for a different practice reality. Curricula are more competency‐oriented, rather than time‐focused. Today's trainees can anticipate a career that includes periodic reassessment of their knowledge base and competency. This article explores these trends and offers some strategies that have proved effective in various parts of the world for training increased numbers of qualified family doctors.

General Practice/Family Medicine is a specialty focused on the provision of comprehensive, continuing, and community oriented, person-centred care. The lack of prestige and the difficulty in attracting trainees to the specialty have been longstanding problems in most countries around the world. In Europe, General Practice/Family Medicine is also hampered for not being recognized as a specialty throughout Europe. As for Portugal, General Practice/Family Medicine is undergoing a massive organizational reform, as well as unprecedented levels of popularity among trainees.General Practice/Family holds tremendous latent potential, and is thus a specialty with a bright future ahead. It could well establish itself as the specialty of the future if it is able to overcome the barriers that currently make of General Practice/Family Medicine an unpopular career choice. It is important to train confident, competent and polyvalent family physicians, but it is also necessary to overhaul payment schemes, to invest in primary care infra-structure and organization, and to continue to attract more and more bright and motivated trainees.