Standards, guidance and curricula

This document sets out the standards for the delivery of medical education and training. These standards have patient safety, quality of care, and fairness at their heart.

Excellence by design sets out the requirements for curricula. Royal colleges and faculties follow these when developing, or amending curricula.

Training in skills like communication, leadership and patient safety is vital to patient care. This framework explains how these skills can be included in postgraduate curricula.

Medical students must meet the necessary standards to apply for provisional registration. Outcomes for graduates sets out the knowledge, skills and behaviours that new UK medical graduates must be able to show.

Before applying for full registration, provisionally registered doctors must meet a high standard. This document sets out the outcomes expected of them.

Medical students must demonstrate a high standard of behaviour at all times: justifying the trust placed in them as future members of the profession. This guidance outlines the standards expected of medcal students – both inside and outside their course or placement – and shows how the principles and values of Good medical practice apply to medical students.

Physician associate (PA) or anaesthesia associate (AA) students must demonstrate a high standard of behaviour at all times, which justifies the trust placed in them as future members of these professions. This guidance outlines the standards expected of PA and AA students – both inside and outside their course or placement – and shows how the principles and values of Good medical practice apply to PA and AA students.

Doctors must keep their knowledge and skills up to date throughout their working life and maintain and improve their performance. Continuing professional development is a key way to meet these professional standards. This guidance is for doctors, but it may also be of use to employers, doctors’ representatives, patients and the public.

This guidance is supplementary to our curriculum standards, Excellence by design, and gives advice for those making decisions about how programmes of assessment are designed and maintained.

This guide is for medical royal colleges and faculties. It explains the principles for the equality and diversity evidence we need to approve changes to postgraduate medical curricula, examinations and assessment systems.

Written for medical schools and postgraduate educators, our successor to Gateways to the professions advises how to support disabled learners, and those with long term health conditions. It is also relevant to help organisations consider how best to support PA and AA students.

This guidance outlines our expectations of medical schools that want to provide UK medical education outside the UK.

This statement is about how the safety of patients is at the core of our new standards for education and training. This includes the expectation that training should take place in an open and honest learning culture.

Guidance to postgraduate deaneries, medical royal colleges/faculties and doctors in training on the management of absences from training and their effect on a trainee’s certificate of completion of training (CCT) date.

This statement sets conditions for training for doctors who are working towards a certificate of completion of training.

Differential attainment is what we call the gap between attainment levels of different groups of doctors. It's an indicator that training and medical education may not be fair. Find out more about the work we are doing about this.

To help widen our understanding of their workplace experiences, we ran a survey dedicated to gather views from SAS and LE doctors. This took place between May and June 2019.

In 2016 we began a review of flexibility in postgraduate medical training, working with stakeholders to find solutions to current barriers to flexibility.