Education must be a key - e.g. Tannahills Health Promoting Schools and a generic framework taught to all, to better lay assess health of self and others. One tool is Hodges' Health Career - Care Domains - Model [h2cm]

http://www.p-jones.demon.co.uk/

- can help identify and map ideas, issues, problems AND solutions. The model takes a situated and multi-contextual view across four knowledge domains:

* Interpersonal;
* Sociological;
* Empirical;
* Political.

Four links pages cover each care (knowledge) domain e.g. Interpersonal:

http://www.p-jones.demon.co.uk/links.htm

- which includes mental health, therapies ...

and crucially a political domain:

http://www.p-jones.demon.co.uk/linksIV.htm

Lancashire
UK
Hodges' Health Career - Care Domains - Model
h2cm: help 2C more - help 2 listen - help 2 care

Dr Tanveer

Thank you for your article.

Have you ever heard of the saying: "Pain is what the patient says hurts"?

"The worried well" is an old cliche which has been used by psychiatrists and psychiatric nurses for yonks - to label people that they mostly do not understand.

A holistic health assessment should include: physical, mental, emotional, social, economic, spiritual, and communication/interpersonal assessments. As a very experienced community psychiatric nurse I have always conducted holistic assessments. I have made provisional diagnoses and then referred clients to psychiatrists, clinical psychologists and other medical personnel, such as GPs. Skilled psych nurses have been doing this for ages.

Cheers
Kay
(retired RPN due to work injury).

Maybe all doctors surgeries need to have a triage nurse. people could phone or drop in and answer some basic questions to establish whether they need to see the doctor or not. Of course, the article is really looking at the wrong end of the problem. If people are seeing a doctor rather than some other professional, the answer is to make alternative support services more accessable, not to make GPs less accessible.