Recognising Scholarship at the heart of the modern discipline of General Practice

Clinical Practice is changing, so medical education must too (Wenzel 2017). In a world characterised by widespread access to knowledge, professional practice is increasingly defined not by what you know, but by how you use what you know (Wenzel 2017).

For General Practice, this means revising our understanding of the medical generalist role. It is no longer sufficient (accurate or adequately distinct) to describe the generalist as someone who ‘knows a little about a lot of things.

Defining generalist practice in terms of 'what you know' invites a continued search for technical solutions (algorithms and are pathways) to the shortage of generalist expertise. WHat we need is enahnced capacity for professional expertise.

Rather we must redefine generalism in terms of what we do with that knowledge. Explicitly recognising the intellectual task of the practitioner who can systematically access an appropriate range of information in order to offer a robust, personalised interpretation of an illness experience and so translate that into an individually tailored action plan (Reeve 2010). Recognising professional practice as the scholarly production and use of ‘knowledge-in-practice-in-context’ (Gabbay & le May 2004).

GP Scholarship describes work to champion and cultivate the intellectual expertise at the heart of the discipline of general practice - recognising that modern healthcare needs gold standard evidence, but also gold standard professional wisdom.