Background The medical regulator in the UK, the General Medical Council, requires curricula and assessments for postgraduate training to be blueprinted to its regulatory statement, Good Medical Practice. A similar document, Tomorrow's Doctors (2009), covers undergraduate education and training. Good Medical Practice, originally designed to regulate medical practice, is not optimally worded as an educational document. The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada's physician competency framework known as CanMEDS is designed with education more centrally in mind.

Methods The wordings of Good Medical Practice and Tomorrow's Doctors (2009) were compared with CanMEDS using ‘word clouds’, a textual analysis tool which provides a display of word frequency, revealing the emphasis in the wording of documents.

Results Good Medical Practice places much greater emphasis on the regulatory rather than the educational aspects of medical practice when compared with CanMEDS and is therefore less suitable for blueprinting curricula, especially in disciplines with high science content such as pathology.

Conclusions Good Medical Practice is less suitable for an educational role and the General Medical Council should consider developing a more specific educational document around these principles.