Reflections on General Practice Training in China: Innovative and Implementable ideas from the Guangdong General Practice Symposium

The concept of general practice in China was first introduced in 1980s in line with several years of healthcare reform. In the last 30 years of general practice development in Australia, the gatekeeping role of general practice has been slowly developed and formulated into health policy and has made steady progress with some remarkable success in certain parts of China. In Australia, general practice education and training were initiated at the time of the founding of the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners in 1964 and a relatively mature system of general practice education and training has been established. To establish a more relevant and effective training model of general practitioners in China by reference to Australian model will be an excellent starting point to introduce into the general practice education, training, clinical services and heath policy strategic plans in China. Methods: Feedbacks from general practice trainees at the Guangdong General Practice Forum collected via an online portal after the lectures and were subsequently analysed. Results: The feedback survey contained the evaluation questions regarding the GP’s response to the academic contents, organization and administration of the forum. The GP trainers and trainees showed very high satisfaction (100%). Twenty-one (95.45%) of the GP trainees agree that the forum is very useful in clinical practice while one (4.55%) GP trainee disagreed slightly that the forum is ordinary. There were four implementable suggestions obtained from the feedback evaluation during the forum. Conclusions: More regular, frequent and consistent GP training forums with experienced overseas GP trainers and medical educators will be needed to improve GP education and training to accelerate the general practice education and training development in China.