Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what statutory responsibilities the General Medical Council has to ensure that doctors have sufficient (a) knowledge and (b) clinical skills to (i) identify and (ii) treat patients with eating disorders.

Undergraduate training is set by individual Medical Royal Colleges against standards set by the General Medical Council (GMC) and the curricula for postgraduate specialty training.

The GMC’s General Professional Capabilities Framework sets out the essential generic capabilities needed for safe, effective and high-quality medical care in the United Kingdom. The framework, which the GMC requires colleges to embed in all curricula, covers the knowledge, skills and behaviours that a doctor must develop in order to ensure accurate and timely diagnoses and treatment plans for their patients.

Diagnosing and treating eating disorders is an important area of medical practice. It is included within the curriculum for all doctors, including for general practitioners (where most eating disorders initially present) and in more depth within training for psychiatry, particularly child and adolescent psychiatry.