[The European mosaic of specialty training programmes in general practice.]

During last decades, general practice has been internationally recognized as an independent and essential medical specialization, with specific skills and tasks. This inevitably created the need to widely implement an organized specialty training programmes to allow future general practitioners to acquire all the skills and knowledge necessary to work within the world of primary care. However, this process has not led to homogeneous applications in European countries, mainly due to the profound and structural differences of each national health system. In our contribution we have tried to make a synoptic comparison of specialty training programmes in general practice in the main European countries (England, Italy, Spain, France and Germany).