Clinical skills for future family physicians - New definitions, collaboration and resources

Abstract

One characteristic of an emerging discipline is the ability to clearly define its body of knowledge and clinical skills. As the burden of disease and role of the family physician varies from country to country it is necessary to do this for different contexts. I was reminded of this recently when two newly trained GPs from Scotland spent 6-months at a local community health centre. On leaving they commented on how they had to learn and perform many new clinical skills in this context. In this edition of the journal we report on a study that defines the clinical skills required of family physicians in South Africa.1 This study reaches a national consensus on 214 core skills at different levels of competency and 23 elective skills. The study assumes that a family physician may need to practice within all components of the district health system; from the first-contact with a patient in primary care clinics and health centres to the wards and operating theatres of the district hospital. It therefore takes the broadest definition of the skills required and expects that after training family physicians will persist with the skills relevant to their career choices. For example the urban private GP will need a different subset of skills as compared to the rural doctor.