Competences of General Practitioners - Medical Students' View vs. The View of Their Lecturers

Pavel Martinek, Martin Seifert

Keywords: Competences, GP, Students, Lecturers

Background:

As a field with a very broad scope, General Practice (GP) does not have clearly defined competences.

Research questions:

How the competences of GPs are percieved by medical students who are yet to attend the teaching of GP
To what extent these perceptions match the perceptions of their lecturers-actively practicing GPs.

Method:

An electronic questionnaire with 18 medical problems was sent to medical students before their GP course started. They were prompted to mark those problems, in which the GP can be the first doctor consulted by the patient and can solve the problem without help of another specialist, without causing harm to the patient. Another question included in the questionnaire addressed the question of whether GPs refer their patients to specialists too often, as is adequate or too rarely. The lecturers filled the same questionnaire.

Results:

346 of 491 addressed students filled the questionnaire (Response Rate 70%).
The most frequently marked conditions were Flu symptoms in an adult (99%), Tonsillitis (90%) and Back Pain (72%), the items least frequently marked were painful knee after a trauma (12%), Alcohol dependence (28%) and Follow-up after a cured colorectal carcinoma (35%).
In the students' group 53% of responders found that the GPs refer their patients to specialists reasonably often, 41% answered that the GPs refer too often. In the lecturers' group (n=9), only 6 of the 18 items did not reach the 100% of positive answers and there was a broad agreement that GPs refer their patients to specialists too often (78%).

Conclusions:

The students assigned far less competencies to a GP than the lecturers did.
The GPs are trusted by future doctors in management of common infectious diseases and non-traumatic orthopedic conditions, or conditions that are difficult to assign to a certain specialty.
Adequate and timely GP education in the curriculums of medical faculties is needed.

Points for discussion:

Possible sources of the huge gap between students' and lecturers' perceptions of GPs' competences

GP competences estimated by the students lower than reality - local or universal phenomenon?

Possibilities for an intervention?

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