Beyond the checklist: Rebalancing structure and lived experience in community-based medical education to nurture compassionate clinicians

Contemporary medical education has increasingly prioritised structure, through competency frameworks, protocols and standardised assessment. These developments have strengthened consistency, transparency and patient safety, and they remain essential.1,2 Yet an over-reliance on what can be defined and measured risks displacing the lived, relational dimensions of clinical learning through which compassion, empathy and reflective awareness are cultivated. When structure becomes too rigid, these human capacities can be diminished or rendered merely performative. Drawing on humanistic and experiential learning theory, and on Neighbour’s awareness-centred account of general practice training, this viewpoint argues for rebalancing, rather than replacing, structured curricula with community-based learning environments that honour lived experience. General practice, with its continuity and relational depth, is uniquely placed to nurture reflective, compassionate practice alongside technical competence.