Are annual medical conferences worth attending?

GPFUQ #234  What’s the value of annual medical conferences?

Annual conferences hosted by academic and member organisations can be costly for attendees and risky for the organisers, but they can be very profitable, influential, and enjoyable events.

Every day, along with requests to write for obscure journals, my email inbox fills with unsolicited invitations to attend, speak at, or even be a keynote speaker at an international conference. Some relate to my areas of interest or expertise, but most have no real connection. These invitations are predatory,1 designed to flatter my ego and empty my wallet.

Even the value of reputable conferences can be a concern. Take, for example, the 2024 WONCA Europe 2-day conference in Dublin. A UK attendee would spend at least £1000 on conference fees, travel, and accommodation. Similarly, the 2024 Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) annual conference in Liverpool cost about the same but did offer discounts for specific attendee groups. Many participants may have their expenses covered by their academic or educational institutions. These conferences may not be predatory, but are they good value in terms of how they plan, assess, and report their economic, social, and environmental impacts and outcomes?

A generation ago, the large GP conferences were often organised by enthusiastic members of the hosting organisations. The aim was to strengthen the professional network and find and spread best practices faster. The quality of these conferences varied greatly from year to year and the financial risks were significant. Today, third-party commercial organisers frequently take on the financial risks, but impose their own rules and claim a share of the profits.

For instance, GUARANT International, a Czech company, organised the 2024 WONCA conference, and Haymarket Media Group managed the 2024 RCGP conference. Despite professional event management, UK medical conferences can fall short compared to the best in class (often their equivalent US conferences) in terms of their organisation, content, and experience.

These conferences can be important fund-raising events for their host organisations. Conference organisers need to have sponsorships, sell exhibition spaces, and attract presenters and attendees. They use marketing tactics to help them. These can include inviting potential attendees to be presenters at the conference, extending deadlines to attract more presenters, and adjusting presentation formats. For example, a presenter might submit a 90-minute workshop but be allocated only a 10-minute talk. If given a 90-minute workshop they may have a room that is too small or unsuitable for the session format. Commercial organisers may blame academic organisers for such issues, but complaints can go unanswered.

High-quality GP conferences should raise their standards and report on their ‘triple bottom line’ — the economic, social, and environmental impacts and outcomes.

From https://bjgp.org/content/75/754/222

What do GPs need to be know?

GPFUQ 235 What do you need to know to be a GP in 2026?

Every week news headlines call for GPs to have extra training in some area of health care. But what exactly should GPs know and be able to do in 2025 and beyond? The official answer is to refer to The RCGP Curriculum, written by the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and approved by the General Medical Council (GMC). This curriculum sets out the knowledge, skills, and attitudes GPs need. It also acts as the main framework for GP specialty training, explaining what doctors need to learn, why it matters, and how it should be taught. 

The curriculum is not a syllabus or detailed teaching manual for specific subjects. Instead, it provides a broad ‘roadmap’ of the areas GPs need to cover.The 2025 edition has grown to 419 pages, not including the super-condensed guides. You will not want, nor need, to read it all, but you may want to refer to it to check what you are now expected to know and do. These expectations are changing faster than ever before. 

When first published in 2004 after a long gestation considering what should define ordinary general practice it was deemed ‘essential reading for anyone with an interest in general practice.’1 It was designed to address the need for an explicit statement of the knowledge, competencies, and clinical and professional attitudes for GPs working in the NHS. In practice it now serves as the educational framework for the 3-year specialty training programme for doctors entering general practice and mostly reads as if the user is a GP educator or registrar.

What’s in the curriculum? It is split into two parts. 

The first part, Being a General Practitioner, starts with the latest definition of a GP: ‘A GP is a doctor who is a consultant in general practice. GPs have distinct expertise and experience in providing whole person medical care whilst managing the complexity, uncertainty and risk associated with the continuous care they provide. GPs work at the heart of their communities, striving to provide comprehensive and equitable care for everyone, taking into account their health care needs, stage of life and background. GPs work in, connect with and lead multidisciplinary teams that care for people and their families, respecting the context in which they live, aiming to ensure all of their physical and mental health needs are met.’

Throughout it reads as an instructional guide for GP training. There is only one paragraph aimed at post-qualification GPs and their lifelong learning: ‘Of course, becoming a qualified GP does not mean that your learning stops. Being a doctor is a process of lifelong learning, not only to keep up to date on medical developments but also to develop expertise and to improve the application of your knowledge and skills as you take on more senior and challenging roles. Your learning needs will differ at various stages of your career, and you need to be able to continuously review, identify and meet those needs. By linking explicitly with the GMC’s Good medical practice guidance, the RCGP curriculum can help you with this process, providing a useful educational framework for the discipline of general practice.’

The second part is a series of topic guides that explore specific capabilities in more depth, applying them in an appropriate professional or clinical context. Each topic guide is intended to illustrate important aspects of everydaygeneral practice, rather than provide a comprehensive overview of each clinicaltopic. Educational jargon peppers the text, sorting issues into domains, frameworks, scopes, and capabilities that can make it harder to follow. There is a new area of work, ‘decolonising the RCGP curriculum’, with its definition given as ‘a process of addressing the colonial legacies that persist within modern medical education, and better understanding how the historical inclusion and exclusion of some knowledge and its producers has shaped the profession we work in’. The RCGP has begun to critically reflect on the origins and formation of our knowledge, how this is taught in primary care, and how it might create unhelpful power hierarchies. It asks: can these be reframed and reconstructed in the curriculum? Alongside the full curriculum, the RCGP has developed super-condensed RCGP curriculum guides on each topic area for ease of reference. Any GP would be wise to check their role as GP in each of these 27 easy-to-use super- condensed guides to be confident theyare keeping up to date. The curriculum is only available online and as a PDF. The new 2025 curriculum and its super- condensed guides can be accessed here:

https://www.rcgp.org.uk/mrcgp-exams/gp-curriculum/curriculum-resources

 

From https://bjgp.org/content/bjgp/76/762/26.full.pdf