Professionalism and Professional Standards for Doctors

This Good medical practice course is for doctors registered with the GMC in any specialty or grade. Professionalism is what patients, colleagues and the public see of you every day: how you communicate, how you work in a team, how you respond when something goes wrong and how you behave inside and outside work. For UK doctors those expectations are set out in the GMC's Good medical practice, and they are checked through annual appraisal and revalidation.

The current edition took effect on 30 January 2024, replacing the 2013 edition, and the course explains what changed. It covers the GMC's role, the core principles of medical professionalism, the four domains of Good medical practice 2024, leadership and working with physician associates, speaking up, professional boundaries with patients and colleagues, and what happens when standards are breached, including a practical guide to the GMC fitness to practise process and to remediation.

It is designed to take approximately 2 hours, including reading, reflection points, a written reflective account and a 15-question assessment. You buy and take it on our portal at your own pace; see the course catalogue for other titles. Healthcare Practise UK is an independent provider. We are not affiliated with any UK regulator or the NHS, and no regulator has reviewed this course.

Good medical practice 2024 is organised into four domains. Module 3 walks through them and the main changes; the other modules apply them to practice.

The course also covers how the GMC uses "must" for overriding duties and "should" where a duty may not apply in every situation, and the related GMC guidance on leadership, raising concerns, boundaries and social media. The GMC's own text always takes precedence. Our GMC page summarises revalidation and fitness to practise for doctors.

Revalidation usually takes place every five years and is based on annual appraisal, where you discuss and reflect on supporting information across your whole scope of practice, including private, locum and voluntary work. The GMC describes six types of supporting information: continuing professional development, quality improvement activity, significant events, patient feedback, colleague feedback, and compliments and complaints. Colleague and patient feedback is needed at least once in each revalidation cycle, and your responsible officer, or a suitable person, makes the recommendation to the GMC.

The GMC does not set a fixed number of CPD hours. Figures such as 50 credits a year come from royal colleges, not the GMC. What matters at appraisal is reflection on what you learned and how it affected your practice. So record the time you actually spend on this course, then add a short reflection on one change you will make, for example in how you respond to a colleague's behaviour or how you raise a concern. Your certificate and reflection together make useful supporting information.

Each module is built around cases from medical practice:

• A GP presents CPD only from her NHS sessions and is reminded that appraisal must cover her private aesthetics work too.
• A trainee hears a senior colleague belittle a nurse's accent and acts, as the 2024 standards expect.
• A specialty doctor notices high complication rates for one procedure, is dismissed by the clinical director, and escalates to the Freedom to Speak Up Guardian and the medical director.
• A doctor receives a GMC letter after a sepsis complaint. He contacts his defence organisation the same day, informs his responsible officer and starts targeted remediation; the case examiners close the case with advice.

Module 5 explains the terms you will meet if a concern is raised: provisional enquiries, the Rule 7 letter that sets out the allegations at the end of an investigation (normally with 28 days to respond), case examiners, interim orders and the Medical Practitioners Tribunal. A stage-by-stage table shows what happens and what you should do at each point.

The reflective account asks what you learned about professionalism, which aspect of your behaviour in your team or with patients you will develop, and your action plan. The 15-question assessment has a pass mark of 12 (80%). On passing you receive a certificate of completion from Healthcare Practise UK.

If your professionalism or conduct has been questioned, this course helps you understand the standards involved and how the GMC process works. It is not, on its own, remediation.

Since 24 November 2025, MPTS tribunals have worked to the Guidance for MPTS tribunals, which replaced the earlier sanctions guidance; read the current version for how it treats insight, remediation and testimonials. In general terms, remediation means addressing the knowledge, skills, conduct or behaviour behind a concern, and insight is shown through honest reflection and changed practice. The course's remediation steps follow that logic: understand exactly what went wrong and the standards that were not met; take specific corrective action such as targeted courses, supervised practice, mentoring, audits and multisource feedback; sustain the change and evidence it; and keep a portfolio that links the concern to the learning and to the evidence of changed practice.

Speak to your defence organisation early and keep your responsible officer informed. The Module on Insight helps you explain why something happened, and the reflective statement builder gives you GMC-specific prompts for a reflection in your own words. Our conduct and trust page sets out a full plan. Courses support remediation; the GMC's decision makers and the MPTS decide.

Two other courses are written specifically for doctors. Ethics and Ethical Standards for Doctors covers the everyday ethical decisions doctors face, from sharing risk and capacity to confidentiality, end of life and conflicts of interest, set against the GMC's ethical guidance. Medical Ethics for Healthcare Professionals works through the four principles of beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy and justice and how to handle ethical dilemmas in practice. Many doctors take this professionalism course with one of them.

If you are responding to a conduct concern, the Conduct and Trust Pack groups Rebuilding Trust, Professionalism for Healthcare Professionals, Fitness to Practise, How to Deal with a Complaint or Investigation and the Insight, Reflection and Remediation modules. When you choose the GMC in the remediation pathway, it adds an ethics course for doctors to that pack. The which course do I need tool narrows the options in four questions.