Abstract
I will focus my comments on uncertainty and surprise in primary care practices. I am a medical anthropologist by training, and have been a full-time researcher in family medicine for close to twenty years. In this talk I want to look at primary care practices as complex systems, particularly taking the perspective of translating evidence into practice. I am going to discuss briefly the challenges we have in primary care, and in medicine in general, of translating new evidence into the everyday care of patients. To do this, I will look at two studies that we have conducted on family practices, then think about how practices can be best characterized as complex adaptive systems. Finally, I will focus on the implications of this portrayal for disseminating new knowledge into practice.
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Crabtree, B.F. 12 Primary Care Practice: Uncertainty and Surprise. In: McDaniel, R.R., Driebe, D.J. (eds) Uncertainty and Surprise in Complex Systems. Understanding Complex Systems. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/10948637_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/10948637_12
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Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-23773-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-32372-3
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