Respiratory diseases (RD) constitute a significant part of the workload of family physicians. There is no consensus on what family doctors should know in this area but established methods for achieving consensus may help to overcome this.

The purpose of the study was to obtain a national consensus on the required knowledge and skills in respiratory medicine for family medicine trainees after vocational training.

A Delphi study was conducted via e-mail with a diverse panel of experts. We developed a Learning Curriculum Framework (LCF) with 399 items adapted from the Royal Australasian College of Physicians ..÷ Respiratory Medicine Advanced Training Curriculum. The LCF was submitted to the experts in two rounds for consensus. Consensus was considered for items that had an agreement of 80% in the classifications above 4 on a scale of importance that ranged from 1 (not important) to 5 (very important).

Consensus was obtained for 159 items (38.8%). These included structure and function of the respiratory tract (0.6%), presenting problems (21.4%), diagnosis (7.5%), interventions and prevention (11.3%), COPD-emphysema (12.6%), tumours (3.1%), infections (10.7%), tuberculosis (5.7%), HIV (1.3%), thromboembolic disease (2.5%), pleural-pulmonary disease (3.1%), pregnancy (0.6%) and sleep disorders (3.8%). Items on iatrogenic diseases and respiratory research did not reach consensus.

Consensus on the respiratory medicine curriculum may contribute to further development of the vocational training curriculum in Portugal. This approach may help teachers in other countries in Europe to develop curricula for respiratory medicine and other areas of general practice.