title: Fitness to practice in the 21st century. What will doctors be doing in the 21st century?
abstract: I am not a clinical doctor, therefore it would be highly presumptuous of me to speculate on what doctors will be doing in 20-30 years time. I suspect it would be a difficult task even for a medically qualified speaker. If you think of what has happened over the past 20-30 years, and of how difficult if not impossible it would have been to predict these developments, then you have some measure of the problem in thinking ahead 20-30 years. So, I'm not going to attempt such an exercise. What I aim to do is refocus the question in the title a little and sketch out some of the health policy and health care concerns which are likely to shape the environment and context in which doctors and other health care practitioners will ply their craft.
authors.affiliation: Nuffield Institute for Health, University of Leeds, UK.
authors.forename: D J
authors.initials: DJ
authors.lastname: Hunter
mesh_terms: D003695:Delivery of Health Care / Q000639:trends*; D004501:Education, Medical; D005544:Forecasting; D006291:Health Policy; D006801:Humans; D010819:Physician's Role; D011057:Politics; D006113:United Kingdom