The state of medical education and practice in the UK : 2013

Dear colleague

Please find a link to a copy of our new report The state of medical education and practice in the UK: 2013 which was launched yesterday.

This is our third report on the state of medical education and practice in the UK. As before we have used General Medical Council (GMC) and other data to provide an overview of the medical profession and to identify some of the challenges it faces.

The report has four main themes:

• The changing shape of the profession and medical education (chapter 1) looks at the changing shape of the profession over the past six years; the state of medical education and training; and for the first time, analyses where doctors are working across the four countries of the UK.

• The shape of complaints and complainants (chapter 2) looks at the nature and source of complaints about doctors to the GMC.

• Variations in the standards of UK medical practice (chapter 3) examines in more detail than previous years the characteristics of doctors receiving a complaint, and considers which doctors are most likely to receive a sanction or warning after a GMC investigation.

• How our data and insights contribute to understanding systems risks (chapter 4) explores the relationships between our data and external data about healthcare systems in England.

The final chapter (chapter 5), Addressing the challenges facing medical practice, considers what we and others can do to address some of the issued raised in this report.

As you will see there is a focus this year on complaints to the GMC - we accept that this is a limited area and that serious complaints affect only a small proportion of the profession. However, we do feel there is more we can understand and learn from these complaints while recognising that they are in no way representative of medical practice in the UK.

If you have any questions, or would like to request hard copies of the report, please don't hesitate to get in touch with us via somep@gmc-uk.org .

Kind regards,

Katy Thomas
European and International Officer
General Medical Council
Regents Place, 350 Euston Road, London NW1 3JN
E: kthomas@gmc-uk.org
D: +44 20 7189 5155
www.gmc-uk.org