Global primary care is local primary care

Abstract

My childhood hero from the British television series, Doctor Who, is a traveller in time and space, who claims to be a 'citizen of the universe'. 1 With such a literally cosmopolitan 2 ethic, The Doctor was incapable of ignoring injustice anywhere he/she (it's complicated!) came across it. Even with such a 'woke' role-model, I regret that I used to get annoyed with colleagues more focused on international than domestic concerns -there is, after all, so much local need and controversy in the UK primary care setting. When we are struggling here, why should we care what happens there? And yet, the first 20 years of the century have more than demonstrated that it is no longer possible to maintain a geographically or professionally insular attitude to practice. The selection of articles for this issue's Life &Times is influenced by the concurrent joint conference of the RCGP and WONCA (29 June to 1 July 2022), but remains relevant to all of us, because, like it or not, practitioners in primary care must now be global in their outlook.