As mentioned in the WONCA Europe statement released in September 2017 (WONCA Europe 2017), there are no common minimum standards for the undergraduate General Practice/Family Medicine (GP/FM) curriculum in Europe. However, standards for the GP/FM Specialty Training have been recently published (Michels et al. 2018).
The European Academy of Teachers in GP/FM (EURACT) and its Basic Medical Education (BME) Committee has been tackling this issue. Data and experiences from European countries have been gathered through the Delphi method to describe the fifteen most important items in GP/FM education, and published in 2011 on behalf of BME Committee (Tandeter et al. 2011). Later, a survey on GP/FM curricula in 14 European countries was carried out in 2017-2018 (unpublished). Ideas were further developed in two workshops for experienced teachers during the WONCA Europe Conference in Krakow (May 2018), the EURACT Medical Education Conference in Leuven (September 2018), and three EURACT BME Committee meetings (2018-2019).
We reached a strong consensus. This paper represents the outcomes of this work and suggests minimum standards that may be applied across Europe. This work on harmonising quality of medical education standards has become imperative following adoption of EU regulation 492/2011 mandating free movement of workers across the EU. “Once and for all, each European member state and educational institution must fully recognise the discipline and specialty of family medicine with its own educational content, research, evidence base and clinical activity” (WONCA Europe, 2017).
Anne Simmenroth, Francesco Carelli, Odd Martin Vallersnes, Mario R Sammut, Natalia Zarbailov, Milena Cojić, Nino Kiknadze, Arabelle Rieder, Valentina Madjova, Alex Harding, Nele Michels and Helena Karppinen on behalf of the BME committee of EURACT
September 24th , 2020
