Abstract
InnovAiT is designed to be relevant to your clinical practice and learning. As such, feature articles are written taking account of the overview within the relevant topic guides of the RCGP curriculum. In turn, each topic guide is intended to illustrate important aspects of everyday general practice rather than provide comprehensive coverage of each clinical topic.
Each feature article within InnovAiT has included a curriculum box since the first issue of InnovAiT in January 2008. The curriculum box summarised what the RCGP curriculum defined a GP should know about the topic in question and marked out sections of the curriculum relevant to the article. With the advent of the new RCGP curriculum in 2019 it became more difficult to make useful, succinct reference to the relevance of content in this way.
The new RCGP curriculum no longer provides a comprehensive, detailed list of the coverage required for each clinical topic. This is in keeping with the aims of the 2019 curriculum, which reframed and redefined the knowledge and skills required for today’s general practice. This has required a change in the presentation of articles within InnovAiT to reflect this new thinking and offers the opportunity for a new approach to learning about general practice from article content.
After consultation and feedback, we have amended the instructions to authors and removed the curriculum box. In place of this, from August 2020, we are incorporating clinical case scenarios within every article. The clinical case scenarios provide an opportunity for authors to illustrate the relevance of article content to everyday general practice and the kind of cases that will present to GPs. These are intended to put article content firmly in the context of general practice as conceived in the new RCGP curriculum, but also to provide a focus for learning activities that relate to acquiring, developing and assessing relevant knowledge and skills. The clinical case scenarios are analogous to the case discussions found within each clinical topic guide of the RCGP curriculum and the breakdown of the core competences are provided to illustrate subsequent reflection and case discussion.
Clinical case scenarios can be used to learn from articles in different ways. They can be adapted for a variety of learning methods and assessments, for example in case discussions, reflective ePortfolio entries and Clinical Skills Assessment (CSA) preparation. We will provide examples of this in future issues of InnovAiT to help your learning. We hope you find this new approach helpful and are encouraged to engage with content and new ways of learning from content. We invite you to submit for publication examples of learning based either on the scenarios within articles or your own clinical experience using any of the different learning methods and assessments.