Every day, we see calls for more testing, quicker diagnoses, and more resources for more medicine.
Yet the greatest challenge healthcare now faces is, arguably, tackling there being ‘too much medicine’ – navigating and managing the wealth of guidance and demands to provide the right level of support to patients, without overburdening them, clinicians and healthcare systems.
In this course, we consider how you can strengthen and sustain your advanced generalist skills in whole-person medicine.
Advanced Generalist Medicine is a clinical approach used in primary care/experienced general practice as well as other areas of medicine. It focuses on delivering expert whole-person care for patients with multiple, complex or interacting health problems. Rather than specialising in one organ system or disease, advanced generalist clinicians develop deep expertise in managing complexity, uncertainty and multimorbidity.
We will consider how you can avoid and tackle “too much medicine”, whilst still getting the balance ‘just right’ for your patients.
What does this course cover?
This course focuses on boosting confidence and skills in the practice of patient-facing whole person medical care and will challenge delegates by posing questions and providing space to critically consider solutions:
- Is there such a thing as 'too much medicine'? What are the implications of over-medicalising on patients, GPs and healthcare services and systems
- Evaluate practical strategies to help manage the impacts of too much medicine, including problematic polypharmacy and treatment burden in multimorbidity
- Critically consider the effectiveness and safety of approaches to expert whole person care in primary care, including avoiding the alternative of ‘too little medicine’
Who is this short course for?
This course is for any UK based GP. If you want to critically and creatively challenge and extend your advanced generalist skills for everyday practice, this is the course for you.
What you will learn
- To differentiate between the knowledge and skills required to deliver expert whole-person care and specialist medicine, and demonstrate the implications for the delivery of whole-person healthcare in general practice
- To explore the role and impact of an advanced generalist medicine approach in tackling modern healthcare challenges, including treatment burden and over-medicalisation
- To assess barriers to advanced generalist medicine, including patient and professional resistance, and the approaches that can be used to address them
How is this short course delivered?
Our flexible courses deliver two days of learning. The first day is expert-guided self-directed learning and day two is an online classroom day on a fixed date.
We use a variety of learning resources, including videos, learning guides and podcasts to explore each topic, and work in action learning sets to apply ideas to real-world problems.
Day one can be completed in a single sitting or broken into smaller sections, at times that fit around your busy schedule. You will be introduced to the core ideas, evidence and tools you will use throughout this course and in your future practice, and we will provide you with a structured series of readings, videos and tasks. You will also interact with fellow learners and your tutors on our course Discussion Board.
On day two, scheduled for 10 June 2026, we will meet online to work together and apply these ideas to practical everyday problems. At the end of the course, you will leave with a selection of practical ideas, tools and connections to take forward in your everyday practice.