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.

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

Basically the requirements of experience are as described below.

For a Certificate of Prescribed Experience, the 1997 Regulations require doctors training for general practice to spend not less than six months in approved posts in each of two of the following specialities (the "listed" specialities):

• general medicine

• geriatric medicine

• paediatrics

• psychiatry

• one of accident and emergency medicine or general surgery or accident and emergency medicine together with either general surgery or orthopaedic surgery

• one of obstetrics or gynaecology or obstetrics and gynaecology

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

For further information see the Joint Committee for Postgraduate Training for General Practice website.

For fuller details read Chapter 2 of the document found at: www.jcptgp.org.uk/policy/sho.pdf