Dr. Gerard Sheehan:

GPs have a great difficulty with the vast number of diseases that they must educate themselves up on. It is probably unrealistic to expect that a GP would have a deep level of knowledge about, say, 500 different entities. We have GPs who rotate to us working as junior doctors and at any one time, there is one GP trainee working on our team. During that three-month period, the trainees get a thorough knowledge of all the major infections that we deal with including tuberculosis, HIV, malaria and Lyme disease. The way that we get educated is to encounter a patient, analyse it and work it out.