OBJECTIVE The aim of the study was to investigate medical students' views on general practice based on their experiences in training, and to find out whether there were certain views associated with the intention to become a GP. METHODS A questionnaire, based on our earlier studies about GP working behaviour, was handed out to medical students in terms 1, 3, 5, 7, 10 and 11 of undergraduate s...

BACKGROUND Audit is a criterion for training in general practice, and registrars are reliant on their trainers' teaching of basic audit methods. Their ability to teach this had been assumed, but registrars' projects submitted as part of summative assessment offered an opportunity to test this. AIM To test trainers' knowledge of basic audit methods. Their knowledge was based on an ability to r...

MEANING AND UNDERSTANDING Health care’s increasing employment of complex technology is often accompanied by a disinheritance of our human complexity. This inverse relationship is undesigned but ever-more important since ‘modernisation’ promises beneficent efficiency for all, yet our common experience is, increasingly, of enduring amidst stressed demoralisation. The profound cultural changes are...

First Do No Harm' is a series of 12 brief monthly articles with internet footnotes about harming and healing in general practice. Each instalment is based on one of the 12 RCGP competency domains, this month's being: 11. Maintaining an ethical approach to practice: practising ethically with integrity and a respect for diversity. 1 'The true aim of medicine is not to make men virtuous; it is to ...

Recent calls for specialty training for general practice to be lengthened have reopened the debate as to the role and value of extensions to training. The literature on extensions and recent developments in the debate are reviewed in this paper, followed by an evaluation report of a novel approach to an extension scheme which ran in Wessex. The scheme was specifically designed not to be 'more o...