General practitioners and other primary care professionals have a leading role in contemporary health care, which Trisha Greenhalgh explores in this highly praised new text. She provides perceptive and engaging insights into primary health care, focussing on: • its intellectual roots • its impact on the individual, the family and the community • the role of the multidisciplinary team • contemporary topics such as homelessness, ethnic health and electronic records. Concise summaries, highlighted boxes, extensive referencing and a dedicated section on effective learning make this essential reading for postgraduate students, tutors and researchers in primary care. From the foreword by Julian Tudor Hart "Trish Greenhalgh, in her frequent columns in the British Medical Journal...more than any other medical journalist spoke to her fellow GPs in the language of experience, but never without linking this to our expanding knowledge from the whole of human science. When I compare the outlines of primary care so lucidly presented in this wonderful book, obviously derived from rich experience of real teaching and learning, with the grand guignol theatre of London medical schools when I was a student 1947-52, the advance is stunning." "Trish Greenhalgh is one of the international stars of general practice and a very clever thinker. This new book is a wonderful resource for primary health care and general practice. Every general practice registrar should read this book and so should every general practice teacher and primary care researcher." Professor Michael Kidd, Head of the Department of General Practice, University of Sydney and Immediate Past President of The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners "This important new book by one of primary care's most accomplished authors sets out clearly the academic basis for further developments in primary health care. Health systems will only function effectively if they recognise the importance of high quality primary care so I strongly recommend this book to students, teachers, researchers, practitioners and policy makers." Professor Martin Marshall, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, Department of Health, UK. © 2007 Trisha Greenhalgh.