General Physicians are highly trained specialists who provide a range of non-surgical health care to adult patients. They care for difficult, serious, or unusual medical problems and continue to see patients until these issues have resolved or stabilised.

Much of their work occurs in hospital settings, and many General Physicians also consult in outpatient clinics.

Their breadth of expertise differentiates General Physicians from other specialists who limit practice to a single body system or a narrow field of knowledge.

General Physicians act as consultants, usually seeing patients referred by other doctors (often a patient’s general practitioner). Their assessment is comprehensive and considers the whole patient.

Global approach: Assessments are holistic, enabling detection of issues and diagnostic possibilities that might otherwise be missed.

Complex care: General Physicians are trained to manage complex illness where diagnosis may be difficult. Their broad training covers problems affecting multiple body systems and the social and psychological impact of disease.

Procedures: They perform a range of medical procedures to diagnose and manage severe and complex conditions.

Diagnosis: They understand the usefulness, limitations, and costs of diagnostic tests, using them safely and effectively to investigate challenging problems.

Treatment: They evaluate evidence and industry claims critically, manage complex polypharmacy, and make balanced treatment decisions for patients with multiple conditions.

Pre- and post-operative assessment: General Physicians review patients before surgery, advise on risk, recommend optimisation, and assist with postoperative care and complications.

The unique combination of knowledge, training, and skills distinguishes General Physicians from other specialists and general practitioners. Through rigorous and comprehensive training, General Physicians are:

• broadly educated to manage the full range of a patient’s medical problems;
• thorough, logical, and scientific in their approach to expert diagnosis;
• able to select medicines and therapies wisely to prevent and treat disease, and to care for patients as whole people, not just body systems; and
• highly skilled in clinical decision-making and the cost-effective use of finite health-care resources.