Happy birthday to the RACGP

On 1 July 2026, the RACGP turns 68. There is so much about the early days of the college that has been forgotten that should be remembered and celebrated.

Australian GPs have been involved in the origins of the United Kingdom’s Royal College of General Practitioners, the RACGP, and even the World Organization of Family Doctors (WONCA).

Let me set the scene. Australia and the UK had just survived the Great Depression and just after that was the second of two disastrous wars. 

There was so much death, destruction and disorder. Wartime rationing continued until 1950 in Australia and 1954 in the UK.
 
At the time, GPs were not organised adequately and were mainly isolated in solo practices, but there was a widespread desire to improve and build a better future.
 
Along came an Australian stirrer, an idealist and a person who spoke truth to power in a way that had to be listened to. His biography is amazing.

Dr Joseph Silver Collings published a very lengthy report into British general practice in The Lancet in 1950.
 
It was frank, polite and brutal. He recognised the importance of general practice and the need to improve it. As a pioneer of health service evaluation, he concluded that any standards in the UK’s general practice depended almost wholly on the doctor’s own conscience.
 
This was the catalyst for the formation of the UK college which formed on 1 January 1953 with a chapter of Australian GPs.

The process then slowly began to form an Australian college rather than be an offshoot of the UK, as the British Medical Association did until it reformed in 1962 as the Australian Medical Association.

When you look at the above picture of our Australian college founders, do not think of them as pale, male and stale pillars of society. They were a small band of rebels and idealists wanting to drastically change the status quo and significantly improve the future.
 
With the typical idealism of all our founders, John Hunt wrote to his UK colleague Fraser Rose in December 1951, saying ‘I had far rather start with a big idea in a small way than a small idea in a big way’. These colleagues were the inspiration of our Rose Hunt Award.

These GP founders wanted collegiality to end GP isolation, standards to protect GPs and patients; education to maintain skills and knowledge; research to constantly improve skills and knowledge and finally advocacy to promote general practice to medical colleagues and to our community.

It was a herculean task in Australia but state by state, faculties formed and then they merged. The Australian College of General Practitioners declared itself formed on 1 July 1958.

This was a start – but not all GPs were involved in the college.

Many thought that the education they had was sufficient and that they did well enough in the status quo. Their patients were happy with them; they paid their bills and they had a roof over their heads. Why change? GPs have long been an independent lot.

It is worth remembering that our profession had been built on the apprenticeship model which we still value.

Prior to the formation of the college, only part of a doctor’s education was done in universities and hospitals.
 
When they went into a practice, their education continued under the care of the senior members of the practice. They would work in the practice as an associate paid a wage or a set proportion of fees.
 
After they had reached an adequate level of skills and experience, they would be offered a chance to buy into an experienced practice. A ‘buy in’ was often the equivalent of a year’s income.
 
Apprenticeship training is, and always has been a critical part of GP training. It teaches more than the formal curriculum, often unintentionally as we copy our mentors.
 
But the apprenticeship model is only useful if the mentors have a formal curriculum and ongoing education themselves.

It needed to adapt as even in those days the pressure to change was blindingly obvious in the rapidly developing tsunami of change from advances in knowledge, skills, technology and therapies.

A century before this renaissance, Florence Nightingale had initiated, assessed and statistically analysed the impact of nursing, a long time before the origin of germ theory, then she had publicised it extensively.

It was now time to analyse general practice, which is delivered up close and personal but can only assessed at a distance and over time. 
 
How else is it possible to detect the absence of illness and disability?

Seduced by the spectacular impact of surgery and procedures, we failed to recognise the importance of the routine consultations.
 
This would be a triumph of impressions over data – if only we collected that data.
 
This is how the RACGP started. The RACGP History Committee studies and analyses what has happened since because it is still learning.

Log in below to join the conversation.

RACGP history