Political issues in internal medicine in Europe. A position paper

Abstract What will be the future of internal medicine in Europe? Because of rapidly growing concerns regarding the position of internal medicine in many European countries, the European Federation of Internal Medicine (EFIM) has established a working group to analyze the situation. Being well aware of the variation in working practices in the different countries, the members of the group used an “all-European” approach to answer the following questions: • Are there problems for internal medicine? If so, what are these problems and why? • Why do the health care systems in the European countries need internal medicine? • Why do patients need internal medicine? • What needs to be done? Interna…