The European Union, besides economical interests, allocates increasingly more attention to the education issues. All member countries of the European Union are characterized by a unified striving for educational processes and education in general. The integration of Lithuania into the European Union stipulates a new approach towards the issues of the organization of the education, including the training of physicians. In the 21st century, together with the rapid scientific and technological development, brought a change in the approach towards the issues of the preservation and the fortification of human health. Within the system of the general healthcare, the priority field became the development of primary healthcare. In this context, there are inevitable changes in the activity of the employees of the healthcare system where, in addition to the treatment functions, increasingly greater emphasis is placed on the solution of psychological and social health problems. This entails the change in the concept of the physician's profession. The new approach towards the human healthcare, the health problems, the strategies for the solution of such problems, and the treatment of patients, raises the major objective: to train general practitioners whose activity within the primary healthcare system would not be limited to the diagnosis and treatment of diseases, but, on the basis of the holistic concept of the human being, would tackle the issues of the preservation, support, strengthening, and restoration of the patient's health. Prior to the independence period, the Lithuanian healthcare system was organized according to the Soviet Union healthcare organization model. At that time, the indices of Lithuanian population's health and the functioning of the Lithuanian healthcare institutions ranked among the best, but this Soviet health model was expensive concerning the state budget, its management was centralized, the level of medical technologies was low, and the qualification of physicians was limited, while healthy lifestyle and health education, including disease prevention, were only declared in various documents, but not implemented in practice (Jankauskiene, D., 2000). After the restitution of the Independence, the union of Lithuanian Physicians, on the basis of the State and international experience, designed a new National Health Concept that replaced the passive, defense-based strategy that forced medical services to combat merely the consequences of diseases. The endorsement of this document provided a scientific basis for the society's new approach towards healthcare inducing the citizens of the state to actively participate in the adoption of healthcare policy decisions, and to care for and to improve their health maintenance; this also emphasized the importance of inter-sector cooperation, as wells as the state and personal responsibility for the formation of the healthcare policy (Lithuanian National Healthcare Concept, 1991), (Principal instruments of the Health Policy, 2000). Speaking of the background of these tendencies, the priority areas of the reform of Lithuanian healthcare should be considered to be not only the changes in the activities of general practitioners, but also in the training and education of general practitioners, as well as in the renewal and the development of the curriculum of the training and education of general practitioners that stipulate their activity. In order to successively solve these priority objectives, the first step that should be taken is a profound analysis of the professional activity of general practitioners, i.e. the investigation of their profession aimed at the determination of the major functions of the activity, and the competences required for the performance of these functions. In his article, the answer to the question of what skills in the general practitioner's qualification structure may ensure the success of the professional activity is sought. The aim of the study was to determine the functions of the activity of a general practitioner, and to define the skills necessary for the performance of these functions. The methods of the study were literature and document analysis, and questionnaire-based inquiry. The article analyzes the activity of general practitioners in the context of the change of the attitude to the physician's profession. The article also discusses the functions of the activity of general practitioners, including the competences required for the effective performance of these functions; in addition to that, the survey of findings of the study performed in Lithuanian family clinics is presented. Although documents that regulate the activity of GPs emphasize not only the medical, but also the social, psychological, and scientific activity, the results of the study showed that this does not correspond to the reality, since GPs do not analyze these documents and do not ground their activity upon them. Instead, they prefer functions that are related to the treatment of diseases, they dedicate the majority of their time to the compilation of the anamnesis, the examination of the patient, the administration of the appropriate treatment, and the control f the course of the treatment. Cooperation with patients and their family members and their consultation cannot be effective if the physician has no required skills. 50% of the respondents stated that their psychological skills were satisfactory or poor. The generalization of the findings of the study allows for stating that the qualification of GPs does not correspond to the requirements raised for their professional activity, which calls for an essential renewal of the curriculum of the training and education of general practitioners