[What do general practitioners expect from internal medicine? Results of postal survey]

The place of internal medicine in the French health care system is a matter of debate. In the process of writing down a project for the department of internal medicine of a University hospital, we decided to assess the expectations of general practitioners toward internal medicine in general, and toward this department in particular.

We carried out a postal survey over a population of general practitioners working in the referral area of our University hospital. The answers of physicians familiar or not with our department were compared with a chi 2 test.

852 questionnaires were sent over and 49.5% were returned. The general practitioners as a whole acknowledge the classical features of internal medicine: medicine dealing with diagnosis and taking in charge unexplained symptoms; holistic medicine in cases of multiple illnesses; medicine dealing with systemic diseases as well as medicine of "niches" (incidentalomas, orphan diseases). The specific orientations of this department of internal medicine are also well known by most physicians: a great majority (94%) of them are satisfied with the help they receive; they stress the need on swift sending of letters (74%); above all, 94% of them wish to obtain rapid appointments for their patients at their request.

These results are in complete accordance with our aim of setting a general internal medicine department at the disposal of general practitioners. They do confirm that outpatient consultation is the hardcore of internal medicine that must be readily available to the patients referred by their general practitioner.