Family Practice in Hospitals

Abstract

FAMILY practice became medicine's 20th-recognized specialty in 1969, when both the American Medical Association's Council on Medical Education and the Advisory Board for Medical Specialties approved formation of the American Board of Family Practice.^1-3In 1970 and again in 1976, the AMA's House of Delegates adopted a resolution stating that hospital departments of family practice should be established "with duties and responsibilities comparable to any other specialty department of the [hospital's] medical staff."^4,5Coincident with the 1976 resolution, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Hospitals (JCAH) authorized family physicians to exercise clinical privileges according to the rules and regulations of their own departments.^6,7 Despite recognition by these national organizations, family practice departments in hospitals have yet to be fully accepted. In many hospitals, departments of family practice are the only departments that do not have responsibility for recommending their own members for hospital privileges. Family physicians at