[Graduate and continuing education from the viewpoint of Hamburg general practitioners]

We wanted to investigate the interest and attitudes towards vocational training and continuous medical education (CME) among general practitioners in the city of Hamburg, Germany and carried out an semianonymous postal survey among all general practitioners (GP) in Hamburg excluding those specialised in psychotherapy using a pretested standardised questionnaire, 225 from 740 GP's responded (30%). More ground after vocational training was desired in the fields of "interpersonal competence", social medicine and specific topics from clinical medicine such as dermatology, psychiatry as well as musculosceletal diseases and complaints. Priorities for CME showed some significant differences with regard to gender and age of the GP's. Main topics for CME were categoried as "interpersonal competence", recognition and treatment of emergencies and pharmacotherapy. Priorities for CME are highly relevant to daily practice. Therefore, the chamber of physicians in cooperation with academic departments of general practice should offer more GP-specific and relevant topics.