Primary care, community medicine and prevention: a convergence of needs.

Both general practitioners and community physicians practise a range of activities along a spectrum from health care to prevention, but increasingly they have come to regard preventive medicine as the key to their respective future roles. This convergence of goals is deceptive because the primary care model of prevention is individual-oriented while that of community medicine is population-oriented. Since an effective preventive strategy is likely to require the use of both these approaches, community physicians and general practitioners should acknowledge the complementary nature of their skills and work towards the integration of their preventive efforts.