Personal Characteristics
Key skills and competencies
Core skills and abilities include:
- A high standard of clinical skill and the ability to deliver
preventive, acute, continuing and end-of-life care of a generalist
nature.
- The ability to frame diagnoses and management in physical,
psychological and social terms, and frequently to manage multiple
diseases and problems in the same patient.
- Effective communication skills and the ability to both build
and use a continuing, trusting, therapeutic relationship with the
patient.
- Skills in risk assessment and the effective use of time when
managing conditions which are likely to be self limiting.
- The ability and the judgement to know when to refer patients
for specialist hospital services, as well as when to use the
capabilities of other health care workers in the extended primary
care team.
- The ability to handle uncertainty of clinical
presentations without recourse to excessive or unnecessary
investigations or hospital admissions, management
capabilities, including managing change.
- The ability to work in teams.
- The ability to use resources cost effectively, to act as
both advocate for the patient and a gatekeeper of health
services.
What other specialties use a similar skill/competence set?
No other specialty requires or deploys the
extensive generalist competence set required of a GP.