By Usman Nasir
“Read the GMC guidelines before your interview”. Whenever you ask a current medical student for recommended reading before an interview, this response tends to crop up a lot in conversation. But it can be daunting to read through all the pages- they can be challenging to navigate and understand. So, stick with this series and together we will break them down and see how you could use them in a medical school interview.
But first a bit of background…
Before we begin let us go through what the GMC guidance is and why it even exists. The GMC (or the General Medical Council) are the governing body for medical training and registration in the UK. They publish a code of conduct for doctors and outline what is expected of them during their professional career. As soon as you enter medical school, you immediately become aware of the GMC and what it stands for as it guides your medical training and highlights the core values of the profession. All doctors must be registered with the GMC to practice in the UK and need to follow the GMC guidance in their practice. We are going to focus on the core GMC guidance that focuses on how to be a good doctor: The GMC GOOD MEDICAL PRACTICE. It is split into the following 4 domains:
Domain 1: Knowledge skills and performance – Medicine is constantly changing so keep on top of your knowledge and skills so you can deliver the best possible care.
Domain 2: Safety and Quality – A “how to guide” to keep your patients safe.
Domain 3: Communication partnership and teamwork – Working with your colleagues and patients, and teaching the next generation of healthcare professionals
Domain 4: Maintaining Trust – The public trust doctors and what they stand for, so make sure you maintain this trust.
(Reference for the GMC Good Medical Practice: https://www.gmc-uk.org/ethical-guidance/ethical-guidance-for-doctors/good-medical-practice )
Don’t worry we will go through all the domains together in this series.
How do I find these guidelines?
You can find the GMC Good Medical Practice via the following website:
It is easy to navigate, and you can browse through all the 4 domains at your leisure. It is a great place to start when thinking about GMC guidance for your interviews. If you are interested, you can scroll through the other documents the GMC have published. But I believe this is the most important one to read for any upcoming interviews.
The GMC have also created interactive “Good Medical Practice in action” scenarios to support their guidance. So, if you feel like you need a break from reading the pages of the guidance, try working through these case scenarios. Each scenario focusses on a patient’s story as they present to a clinic and it shows you how the GMC guidance can be implemented for each patient. I found that this was an extremely valuable tool when preparing for interviews as the real-life scenarios helped me put the GMC guidance into context. You can find them all by clicking the “Characters” tab on the following link:
This was just a brief introduction to get us talking about the GMC guidance. Stay tuned for the rest of this series to find out how to use each domain of the Good Medical Practice in your interview answers.
Next up…
Please give me some guidance on the GMC guidance: Domain 1 – Knowledge Skills and Performance.
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