Background

As a doctor in general practice you do not deal simply with organ systems and symptoms, but with people and problems. The RCGP curriculum has been developed to reflect this. The meaning of the curriculum will increasingly be conveyed by showing not just how you as a general practitioner (GP) must manage illnesses, but how problems present differently in different types of patients with different implications, and in ways that require different types of management.

The RCGP curriculum, approved in 2006, was the first attempt in the UK to define the indefinable, i.e. the complex competences that are required by doctors in undertaking the work of the expert clinical generalist. These competences were not developed by UK GPs alone but through extensive discussion with generalists around the world and particularly in Europe. The European Definition of General Practice defined the characteristics of general practice. These characteristics are generic and can be applied to any and all problems that present in general practice, and the competences needed to be a GP were derived from them.

By using such a broad range of perspectives, the ideas and principles that form the foundation of the curriculum are comprehensive enough (leaving no important gaps) and deep enough (well thought through) to stand the test of time. It is on this foundation that both your lifelong learning as a GP and the periodic assessments that you will undertake during and after training are based.

General practice itself is continually changing and although the deeper features of your practice are unlikely to change, the contexts in which GPs work will continue to alter rapidly. The GP curriculum could therefore never be an exhaustive list of all the possible learning outcomes relating to all the contexts in which you as a GP work. This would probably be impossible and would certainly be unhelpful in meeting the primary aim of a curriculum, which is to achieve a careful balance between providing enough information to encourage greater understanding of the ideas and principles of the discipline without giving so much detail that it becomes difficult to see the wood from the trees.

Go to European Definition page

Go to Competences page

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