The changes in the 2026 Revision of the FP Curriculum 2021 are small but important. They help make the curriculum clearer and more up to date.
What the revision is trying to do
- Keep the curriculum as a generalist curriculum. This means it supports foundation doctors to build broad skills that can be used in many areas of medicine.
- Make patient safety more visible throughout the curriculum.
- Use clearer and more inclusive wording, including better recognition of care for children and young people.
- Reflect current healthcare priorities, including health inequalities, multimorbidity and sustainable healthcare.
- Keep the curriculum practical and deliverable for foundation doctors, supervisors, medical education teams and foundation schools.
What is staying the same
- The three Higher Level Outcomes (HLOs)
- The 13 Foundation Professional Capabilities (FPCs), although some wording has been updated
- Supervised Learning Events (SLEs)
- Quality improvement (QI) activity
- Foundation doctors do not need to complete a separate sustainability or patient safety quality improvement project for ARCP.
- Clinical Supervisor Reports (CSRs) and Educational Supervisor Reports (ESRs)
- Multisource feedback, including TAB and PSG
- The ARCP checklist
What has changed
- Patient safety
- Patient safety is now described more clearly as central to medical practice. Foundation doctors should show how they learn from and contribute to safer care.
- Foundation doctors are encouraged to include patient safety evidence in their portfolio. This may include safe prescribing, handover, documentation, use of guidelines, team working, blood transfusion or learning from QI activity.
- Sustainability
- QI activity should include consideration of sustainability where relevant. This includes environmental sustainability and sustainable healthcare.
- Further information about how foundation doctors can interact with this topic is on the UKFPO Sustainability and quality improvement microsite.
- Children and young people
- Wording has been added to reflect a more inclusive approach to recognising the healthcare FDs provide to children and young people
- Core teaching programme
- The core teaching programme has been updated to reflect current learning needs, including health inequalities and multimorbidity.
- Stylistic changes
- Some terminology has been updated, for example
- “trainee” has been replaced with “resident doctor”, “foundation doctor” or “FD”
- “differential attainment” has been replaced with “fairer training cultures”
- Most external links have been removed from the curriculum document and moved to the UKFPO website (Curriculum references), so they can be kept up to date more easily.
- Some terminology has been updated, for example
Overall, the 2026 revision keeps the main structure of the curriculum, while making the curriculum clearer and better aligned with current practice. All UK foundation doctors will use the 2026 Revision of the FP Curriculum from August 2026.