ABSTRACT
The General Medical Council (GMC) document Tomorrow's Doctors lists the knowledge, skills and attitudes that students should acquire during their undergraduate medical education. The authors point out the two essential aims of this period of education. These are to prepare for the house officer year and to prepare for lifelong practice. Training in communication skills is clearly of great importance for future general practitioners (GPs). It helps ground them in the 'illness' model as well as the 'disease' model. It helps them to adopt a patient-centred approach to the consultation, checking out with the patient such things as the agreed agenda for the consultation, likely diagnoses and possible management options. The emotional education of doctors has to be one of the basic themes of the educational process, informing everything else. Perhaps the first, and most important, step is for those responsible for teaching to have the confidence to allow the learners to be exposed to highly emotional situations.
