Inclusive care is not a specialty. It's just good medicine.

We get asked sometimes what makes MyFamilyGP different. And the honest answer is not a list of services — it is a way of approaching every consultation.

We believe that healthcare works best when it is built around the actual person, not a generic version of a patient. That means asking different questions, spending longer listening, and — especially for patients whose identities, bodies, or communities have historically been misunderstood by medicine — doing the extra work to earn trust before expecting it.

That is not a special programme. It is just how we think general practice should work.

The art and the science.

Our doctors value the art of medicine equally to its science. Evidence and guidelines give us the science. The art is everything else: how a doctor listens, what they notice, how they explain, when they push and when they wait. Both matter. A practice that has only one of them is half a practice.

What "safe space" means in clinical terms.

A lot of practices describe themselves as a safe space. We want to be specific about what we mean by it, because vague reassurance is not the same as structural commitment.

At MyFamilyGP, safe means: you can tell us your pronouns and we will use them, every time. It means you can describe a symptom that is tied up with your identity — your hormones, your sexuality, your gender — and we will respond clinically, not with discomfort or judgment. It means the questions we ask are the right questions, not just the standard ones from a template.

It also means that if we do not know something, we will say so — and then go and find out. Dr Tomson did not co-author South Africa's first gender-affirming hormone therapy guideline because the answers were already obvious. She did it because the gap needed filling.

How we think about evidence.

We follow the evidence. That might sound obvious, but it means something specific at MyFamilyGP: we update our practice when the evidence updates. Guidelines in LGBTQIA+ healthcare, gender-affirming medicine, and women's health have changed significantly in recent years, and staying current is not optional for us — it is the baseline.

We are also careful about the limits of certainty. Not every symptom needs a scan. Not every result outside a reference range needs a referral. Part of being a good doctor is helping patients understand what actually warrants action and what can be safely watched — and being honest when we do not yet know.

Continuity as a clinical value.

The longer a doctor knows you, the better they can care for you. That is not a platitude — it is a clinical reality. A doctor who knows your history can catch things earlier, interpret ambiguous results more accurately, and have harder conversations with more honesty.

That is why we have stayed a small practice. We would rather be the right doctor for the patients we see than try to be everything for everyone.