Good Medical Practice: your help on shaping our core ethical guidance

We first asked for views on Good Medical Practice in April and have had an excellent response from doctors, patients and relevant organisations.

‘It’s vital that this guidance reflects what the profession believes makes a good doctor and that it supports and encourages good practice in every specialty and at every level,’ said Niall Dickson, the Chief Executive of the GMC.

‘We now need a similar engagement when we publish the new draft – it needs to make sense and feel relevant to every practitioner.’

We are finalising a new version of the guidance

The new draft of Good Medical Practice will be published for consultation in October.

The biggest change is that the guidance has been restructured under the four main headings in the Good Medical Practice framework for appraisal and revalidation:

• knowledge, skills and performance
• safety and quality
• communication, partnership and teamwork
• maintaining trust.

The draft will also set out some new duties. The details will all be set out when the consultation is launched. If you would like to receive an email alert as soon as the consultation opens, view the Staying up to date with the Good Medical Practice review page. 

There is still time to shape the draft guidance

Until then, we are still keen to hear from doctors in ways that will help us finalise the new draft. This month, we are asking what the guidance should say about doctors’ lives outside medicine. There are comment pieces from Miss Shree Datta (Co Chair of the BMA's Junior Doctors Committee), Dr Melissa McCullough (lecturer in medical ethics and law at Queen's University Belfast), Mr Sol Mead (Chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges Patient Liaison Group), Dr Christopher Pell (General Adult Psychiatrist working in NHS Tayside) and Mr Antony Townsend (Chief Executive of the Solicitors Regulation Authority). And, in our ethical soap, our GP Julia meets a young patient who is being bullied at school.

Earlier topics we’ve asked about have included the fundamental question of what makes a good doctor, the role of individual doctors in addressing health inequalities, and what you think is missing from the current version of the guidance.

If you are able to contribute, thank you!