Public policy implications of graduate follow-up studies in family practice

An assessment of the progress of family practice over the last ten years, from the point of view of public policy analysis, finds that family practice has adequately and successfully addressed the majority of the policy issues of concern to its major constituencies in the early 1970s. The decade of the 1980s finds family practice as a vigorous, thriving specialty, which has met many of the early expectations of its supporters. Now, however, because of its own growth and the changing environment of medical practice in the United States, family practice faces a broad range of expectations and policy challenges from a wider, and in some cases more hostile, constituency.