Rheumatology Advance Access originally published online on February 2, 2008
Rheumatology 2008 47(3):237-238; doi:10.1093/rheumatology/kem362
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© The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the British Society for Rheumatology. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
EDITORIAL |
The role of specialists in managing established rheumatoid arthritis
1Department of Rheumatology, KCL School of Medicine, Weston Education Centre, London and 2ARC Epidemiology Unit, The University of Manchester, School of Translational Medicine, Oxford Road, Manchester, UK.
Correspondence to: D. L. Scott, Department of Rheumatology, KCL School of Medicine, Weston Education Centre, 10 Cutcombe Road, London SE5 9RS, UK. E-mail: david.l.scott@kcl.ac.uk
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
Rheumatologists, nurses, therapists and general practitioners (GPs) all contribute to managing patients with RA. Shared care is consequently a prerequisite for good care [1]. Some aspects of RA follow-up in the UK are traditionally devoted to primary care. An example is prescribing and safety monitoring of DMARDs in patients receiving long-term stable therapy. GPs can provide blood tests through near patient testing [2] with national guidelines providing a framework to manage risk [3]. A