Becoming a General Practitioner 

Are you, or about to be, a fully qualified and registered doctor who is interested in becoming a General Practitioner?

There have been many changes in the organisation of General Practice in recent years but it is still a rewarding career. The challenges and satisfactions are different from a career in hospital medicine.

There is more contact with patients. That contact can span more than one generation of their lives giving you the opportunity of being involved with people as they grow up and develop, mature and expand their lives. Then there is the challenge of helping people through illness and their declining years.

Being a good practitioner is probably more difficult than being a hospital specialist. The breadth of knowledge required is great. There is no branch of medicine that you do not need to have some knowledge of. You need to keep up to date as knowledge in those areas expands and changes. You need to be able to communicate with all sorts of people. You need to understand the NHS in order to enable your patients to get the most out of it. You need to acquire skills of management. But what do you need most? You need a good training scheme that can help you towards equipping yourself for this demanding career.

Requirements and experience

Training programmes for general practice are now regulated by the Postgraduate Medical Education Training Board (PMETB) and will generally be of 3 years duration. Satisfactory completion of this training leads to a CCT or Certificate of Completion of Training. Further details can be found on the PMETB website as well as that of the Royal College of General Practitioners.

The 3 year programme must include:

• at least 12 months full time employment in general practice
• at least 12 months full time employment in hospital training posts approved for general practice

Several hospital posts are potentially eligible. These can be divided into List A and List B posts, as below.

List A

3-12 months of the following, usually between 4 and 6 months

• A&E
• Paediatrics or community paediatrics
• General medicine or geriatrics or dermatology or GU medicine or rehabilitation medicine
• O&G
• Psychiatry or old age psychiatry
• Palliative medicine

The maximum period in any one the "listed" specialities that can count towards the hospital component of the training programme is 12 months.

 List B

6 months maximum in the following (providing the overall programme is balanced)

• cardiology or medical oncology or clinical oncology or gastroenterology or endocrinology and diabetes or haematology or nephrology or respiratory medicine or rheumatology or neurology or infectious diseases
• child and adolescent psychiatry or psychiatry of learning disability
• ophthalmology or ENT or ENT surgery or general surgery or paediatric surgery or urology or trauma and orthopaedic surgery
• ITU
• Public Health medicine

For further information see the Postgraduate Medical Education Training Board (PMETB) website.