The promotion of health as well as the delivery of care of conditions like these often occurs within the community, outside the context of University teaching hospitals, provided by professionals from several disciplines, including a significant click here input from social services. In the recently published UK government’s white paper, Equity and Excellence: Liberating the National Health Service (NHS),2 a need for a healthcare system focused on personalised

care reflecting individuals’ health and care needs was outlined. This would involve supporting carers and encouraging multidisciplinary care. These social demographic and political drivers require strong input from multiprofessional

healthcare providers in primary care and the recruitment of more general practitioners (GPs) in order to fulfil the growing need for community-based care. This concept also resonates globally and is considered important by health regulatory bodies that license medical schools. In 1987, the WHO recommended the reform of health professional curricula by incorporating methods to prepare students for providing care at all levels of healthcare settings,3 which can be achieved by, among other things, aligning education with community needs. The UK General Medical Council’s (GMC’s) document ‘Tomorrow’s Doctors’ recommend that clinical placements should reflect the changing patterns of healthcare and that they must provide experience in a variety of environments including hospitals, general practices and community medical services.4 Curricula in the UK medical schools, therefore,

currently offer community-based education (CBE) in various forms and models of teaching.5 CBE is defined as a medical education programme that may employ any variety of teaching methods to promote an understanding of health concerns at a community level. The programme is set within the community, and involves individuals within the community. Previous publications have evaluated these models of medical teaching in the community, including analyses of their advantages and drawbacks.6–28 However, a thorough literature search (as conducted in November 2013) found no existing systematic Cilengitide reviews on community-based teaching across all existing UK medical schools. It remains unclear what the extent of community-based teaching in UK medical schools is, the impact this had made to the standards of healthcare, and how the effectiveness of community-based teaching programmes has been measured. Knowledge of this is considered important, as it would guide the structuring of undergraduate medical curricula to adapt to changing contexts in the UK, hence effectively developing a future generation of doctors who are appropriately prepared for upcoming healthcare needs.