In January 2025, DeepSeek launched its reasoning model DeepSeek-R1, characterized by open-source accessibility, cost-effectiveness, and strong reasoning capabilities, thus showing significant potential for applications within the medical domain. This paper examines the prospects for DeepSeek's implementation in general practice, demonstrating its potential to support clinical decision-making at primary care levels, facilitate comprehensive health education and management throughout the healthcare lifecycle, and bridge service gaps in remote, impoverished, and underserved regions. Additionally, DeepSeek-R1 enables to enhance research efficiency and promote innovative modes of medical education and training. However, its deployment also faces challenges concerning data governance, ethical standards, and technical specifications. Future exploration is recommended to facilitate the deep integration of large language models such as DeepSeek into multiple dimensions of general practitioners' activities-including clinical practice, scientific research, and medical education-thus maximizing the empowering role of artificial intelligence in general practice, developing an intelligent primary care ecosystem, and promoting high-quality development in general medicine.
General practice research in China needs to further explore the path for breaking through the bottleneck of the discipline development from the perspective of philosophy and methodology.
By comparing and analyzing qualitative research articles published in benchmark journals, strategies for further advocating qualitative research in general practice medicine in China are proposed.
Based on a brief analysis of the categories and topics research articles published in the British Journal of General Practice, the author reflects on the current relevant publications and challenges of qualitative research in medical discipline and proposes strategies to promote qualitative research in general practice.
Qualitative research in the British Journal of General Practice accounts for 38% (41/107) of research articles in 2024. The people-centred orientation of general practice encourages researchers to explore experiences, views, perceptions and opinions of patients, laypersons, doctors, nurses, and stakeholders, to plan and provide primary care that with humanity, responsiveness, and participatory. Social science methodologists and academic general practitioners who are interested in sociological research methods are the main driving force for the application of qualitative research in the field of general practice. The tradition of biomedicine philosophy with positivism is a disciplinary barrier that medical-trained need to overcome when conducting qualitative research. Academic general practitioners must understand the difference between ontology and epistemology, and acknowledge and try the interpretivist way of thinking. Different from qualitative data collection and coding techniques that are relatively easy to learn, during the training and learning process of qualitative research, special attention should be paid to breaking through the inertia of thinking and using interpretivism as another window to understand the world and primary care.
Qualitative research is an important area for the development of general practice disciplines. Better quality qualitative research first depends on the enrichment of philosophical thoughts and then use the tools and tactics to realize another understanding of the world.
The report of the 20th CPC National Congress pointed out that it is necessary to "develop and strengthen the medical and health care workforce, focusing efforts on rural areas and communities". General practitioners (GPs) are the "gatekeepers" of residents' health and medical expenses, and play an important role in basic medical and health services. Training applied and complex new-age GPs who can be deployed, retained and utilized is an important step in promoting the construction of a healthy China. On the basis of Training Development Report of GPs (2018), this report systematically reviews the team construction, training and education, reform of utilization and incentive mechanism of GPs in China from 2018 to the present, and puts forward the future outlook of GPs in China in the hope that it can provide information for further research on general practice in China.
