[Family practice and health care of the aged]

The characteristics of health status of the elderly as well as the assumptions about their future tendencies indicate that primary health care for the elderly is becoming a prominent part of the overall health care. By developing the family practice, elderly people should be provided with different obligatory forms of primary health care--obligatory preventive minimum: health education and guidance, systematic medical examinations, maintenance and development of the existing functional abilities of patients such as treatment, nursing and rehabilitation in patients homes and homes for the elderly, as well as delivery of urgent medical care. The basic principle in health care for the elderly within the primary health care is an active and epidemiologic approach in a certain field, which includes the choice of family physician whose team could provide an integrated comprehensive primary health care which would be at the same time appropriate to the population health needs and also efficient and rational.