Medical and public health research of the European economic community

Scientific collaboration within EEC includes medical and health research programmes. Few and rather small activities started up in 1978, but have rapidly grown now to include participation of more than 1,200 teams from all member states involving about 2,000 scientists counted in men-years. Since 1984 primary health care research has been given high priority. The first scientific step has been established in collaboration with the European General Practice Research Workshop (EGPRW). As a necessary start of future research a detailed descriptive study of primary health care in the 12 member countries and some non-member countries, including all Nordic started up in January 1986. Based on this study a source-book of importance for further activities like "the interface between primary and secondary health care services", "sentinel data collecting centres", "reasons for encounter" etc. will be published. EEC-medical and health research in collaboration with other scientific organizations within primary health care surely will be able to give a most valuable contribution to the medical sciences as such in the future and not least to general practice and primary health care.