COVID-19 and primary care in six countries.

With the focus of the COVID-19 pandemic on the many challenges in public health, acute and long-term care, what has happened within primary care has remained largely below the radar. Yet primary care physicians (family doctors and GPs) can constitute up to 50% of the medical workforce1 and are highly susceptible to contracting emerging infectious diseases themselves, as they are often the first point of contact people have with the health system.2 This article comments on what is happening to primary care provision in six well-resourced countries: Australia, New Zealand (NZ), Canada, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. Although primary care has been on the front line with COVID-19 cases, this has come at great cost. In all six countries, primary care physicians participated in the initial assessment and triage of people with possible COVID-19, although how that was done varied between countries, and was rarely in the physician’s office (Table 1). They decided who could be managed at home, and who needed specialist referral or hospital admission. Physicians often deferred routine follow-up visits in their offices, instead offering patients remote assessments by telephone, email, and videoconferencing, and assisting in assessment centres.