GP placement student toolkit

Publication date:
07 October 2021
Date range:
N/A

Know your anatomy

Knowing your anatomy can help you understand a patients condition but also help you to determine what structures could potentially be affected. eg. knowing the structure of the lumbar spine can help you to understand why bending forward may be painful for someone with a disc herniation but eases the pain for someone with a spinal arthritis.

or

knowing the structure of the knee can help you differentiate whether a patient is suffering from a meniscus or ligament injury.

You should treat a placement within a GP as a musculoskeletal rotation. This means you should revise the structures of the cervical,shoulder, elbow,wrist/hand, lumbar, hip,knee, and ankle/feet. Specifically looking at the bones, ligaments, joints, muscles and tendons for each region.