2025 National Family Medicine Week: Oct. 29 through Oct. 5

Today marks the start of National Family Medicine Week, when we say thank you to family physicians around the country for all they do to keep Americans healthy. (And they do a lot!)

Family medicine is the medical specialty that provides primary care to patients throughout their lifespan. From delivering babies to working in hospice care and everything in between, family physicians don’t just specialize in a particular population, disease, or organ. They are a patient’s first contact for health concerns and help coordinate specialist care.

We hear frequently from our members that continuity of care is an important aspect for them; it’s not uncommon for family physicians to take care of patients as children and watch them grow. Then, when those patients have families of their own, family physicians take care of them too! And that’s just one aspect of the holistic nature of family medicine.

Family physicians are thinking about external factors that may affect a patient’s health (something unique to a community or social determinants of health, for instance) as well as the impact of a patient’s health on their family. More facts about family physicians, courtesy of the AAFP:

• Family physicians average 82 patient encounters per week.
• More than 86% of AAFP members accept new Medicare patients, while more than 70% accept new Medicaid patients.
• In addition to traditional outpatient care, you’ll also find family physicians doing emergency care, urgent care, intensive care, sports medicine, sleep medicine, and hospitalist work.

Join us in thanking family physicians for the work that they do, and have a healthy National Family Medicine Week!