Fundamental Skills for General Practice Assistants

The programme focuses on five key areas that will help you to contribute to a more effective working environment for staff and patients:

• care
• administration
• clinical
• communications
• managing health records.

Included are topics such as implementing safe, person-centred approaches to care, conducting basic patient consultations and engaging patients to be actively involved in their health and wellbeing, as well as the underpinning knowledge and practical application of a range of core clinical competencies.

The course aims to also develop your healthcare-specific administrative and professional skills, to ensure that you are comfortable, competent, and confident in how you contribute to the effective running of your working environment.

Supporting you
The ARU programme academic lead will act as your personal and academic tutor throughout the course.

You will also be working alongside a GP mentor you have identified from your practice (as well as other colleagues, or a secondary mentor that may be best-placed to support you along the way with certain non-clinical tasks or competencies).

Learning made simple
The 36-week programme is delivered via a flexible, blended-learning approach.

For the majority of the course, there will be around one hour of online, asynchronous learning per week. This means that the content and activities for that week will be made available for you to work through in your own time, however best fits into your usual weekly schedule. You will also be invited to join your tutor and peers for regular live online group tutorial sessions.

Occasionally, you will also be invited to attend in-person sessions at ARU in Writtle. This will include an initial induction to welcome you to the course and provide some more information; and a practical workshop mid-way through the programme, which will cover the more ‘hands-on’ elements of your competency framework.