Phase 3: Standards

Since the publication in March 2000 of ‘The Scottish Doctor’ there has been a significant move internationally in medical education to an outcome-based model for curriculum development (see section 2.1). In the UK the General Medical Council (GMC) has been concerned with learning outcomes. It has a statutory role to oversee, quality assure and authorise undergraduate medical education in the UK. The Council publishes guidelines for undergraduate medical education which medical schools must adhere to in order to attain GMC recognition (see section 2.2). In phase 3 of ‘The Scottish Doctor’ project the learning outcomes statements in ’The Scottish Doctor’ have been mapped to those published by the GMC in ‘Tomorrow’s Doctors’ (General Medical Council 2002). An evaluation has been carried out as to where they were congruent and where they differed. In general, the two frameworks were found to be equivalent and the number of changes in ‘The Scottish Doctor’ outcomes required as a result of this study were relatively small.

The work of reviewing ‘The Scottish Doctor’ learning outcomes has also been informed by the descriptions of curricula and learning outcome frameworks reported for a series of specialised areas in medicine including acute and emergency medicine, dermatology, neurology, palliative care, pharmacology and therapeutics and sexual health.

This work has been the basis for a re-examination of ‘The Scottish Doctor’ learning outcomes and for a refinement of the learning outcome statements published in the second edition of ‘The Scottish Doctor’ where this was deemed appropriate. The SDGMC hopes that the report resulting from its activities will provide, as in the earlier versions of ‘The Scottish Doctor’ a broad intuitive flexible user-friendly approach to the specification of learning outcomes for use by the practising teacher, the curriculum developer, the student, the researcher or the administrator in relation to curriculum planning, teaching and learning and assessment.

Click to download an MS Word formatted version of the Scottish Doctor 3