Optional career development
Explore and develop your future clinical practice
QI, teaching and professional reflection can help you develop clinically and assess career fit. They are not scored portfolio activities for standard GP ST1 or Core Psychiatry CT1 selection. Focus recruitment preparation on the MSRA and published eligibility requirements.
Use a QI project that addresses a real practice problem such as access, prescribing, continuity or a patient-safety process.
Keep examples of managing uncertainty and risk with limited information and appropriate safety-netting.
Build teaching around common primary-care problems and prevention rather than rare hospital cases alone.
Reflect on continuity, multimorbidity and how social context changes what good care looks like.
Royal College / Faculty watchlist
Current topics worth understanding
These are topics for professional understanding and career exploration, not predicted MSRA questions or interview stations.
AI in general practice
RCGP's January 2026 position recognises potential benefits from AI while calling for clearer regulation, guidance, safety expertise, training and clinician involvement in design.
Why it matters for a candidate: Evaluate usefulness and workload alongside reliability, liability, patient safety, environmental impact and professional accountability. This is career learning, not a GP ST1 interview prompt.
Read the primary sourceFairer Practice Toolkit and health inequalities
The RCGP's 2026 Fairer Practice Toolkit gives practices a structured way to identify actions that may reduce barriers and health inequalities.
Why it matters for a candidate: Think about access and equity as things a practice can measure and improve, while recognising wider social determinants beyond a single consultation.
Read the primary sourceUseful stuff
Official tools you can actually use
Career-fit reflection
Does General Practice fit the work you want to do?
How much do you value broad first-contact responsibility and seeing clinical problems in their wider life context?
Start with something you genuinely experienced. Explain what it taught you about the work, what appealed to you, what challenge you noticed and what you did next. This is career reflection, not an extra entry interview.