[Complexity of care in general practice--problems in establishing adequate outcomes of care].

Using four main characteristics of general practice it will be shown that the one-dimensional outcome parameters that are used in health care, and increasingly so, are inappropriate for assessing the quality of care. On the contrary, such an oversimplification might be expected to be detrimental to the quality of health care. This should be kept in mind when planning studies on the quality of care in general practice. In this text general(ist) practice will be taken as a textbook example of medical, i.e., professional practice.