Our system of medical education is still designed to produce community clinicians only as a by-product, an afterthought following a core curriculum designed by and for specialists. Its central aim remains the production of specialist excellence, unsullied by prior contact with the society it serves. It is training the wrong people, at the wrong time, in the wrong skills, and in the wrong place. The core curriculum for all doctors should be primary care: this should be taught where it is actually carried out, within communities; and the primary generalists produced in this way require not a year or two of rehabilitation in specialised vocational training, but a lifetime of in-service postgraduate study [1]. Much has changed in the 33 years since Julian Tudor Hart wrote this about medical education in the United Kingdom (UK) but are we still training the 'wrong people, at the wrong time, in the wrong skills, and in the wrong place'? In 2010, the Independent Commission on the Education of Health Professionals for the twenty-first century concluded that, globally, 'the content, organisation, and delivery of health professionals' education have failed to serve the needs and interests of patients and populations' [2]. In a linked Lancet editorial, Richard Horton described critical failures in health professional education systems worldwide including a 'chronic lack of primary care workers, rural-urban disparities, too little attention to disease prevention, isolation from the social sector, and insufficient concern with the social determinants of health and citizens' engagement in health' [3]. This sounds all too familiar and is the wider global and multi-professional context within which general practitioner (GP) teaching and training in the UK fits. This article will focus on the particular challenges of GP teaching (undergraduate) and training (postgraduate) in (and for) areas of severe socioeconomic deprivation (sometimes referred to as 'Deep End' general practice [4]). It is now widely accepted that most medical schools do not provide students with adequate general practice teaching time [5]. This is one of several drivers of the current workforce 'crisis' in UK general practice [6,7]. The Department of Health in England's target is for half of all medical students to become GPs [8]. Surveys suggest that general practice is the first career choice for less than a quarter of UK medical graduates [9,10].