Training for general practice.

  • Great Britain. Joint Committee on Postgraduate Training for General Practice.
Date:
1982
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Training for general practice. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    22/80 (page 20)
    Organisation Because of the constraints noted above, the final shape of the release course is bound to represent a compromise in which a purist educational approach may have to be sacrificed to achieve something worthwhile for the greatest number. This is not incompatible with maintaining standards: the compromise is not over standards but over aims and the allocation of resources. The inevitability of multiple entry dates into the course will require flexibility of the syllabus, and a common arrange- ment is for a sequence of ten weekly sessions occupying an academic term, each of the three terms having perhaps a separate theme. The cycle may be repeated every one, two or three years depending on the overall length of the course; and in turn this will partly depend on whether there is a separate course for general practice trainees or whether they are integrated with their hospital colleagues. Individual sessions may consist of lecture-discussions; group work centred on current cases, audio tapes, video tapes, journal articles, or a review of records; reports of trainee projects; or a combination of these. Responsibility for planning and running the course is usually vested in a single organiser. He has the full support of the Regional Adviser and can call on other resources such as the local clinical tutor, general practice trainers, workshop leaders, and teachers in academic departments of general practice. He co-operates closely with the clinical tutor, especially over the programmes for trainees in hospital posts. While the organiser will naturally wish to promote his own ideas he will encourage trainees to participate in the planning of their course and not to adopt a passive approach to their own educational programme. There will usually be frequent opportunities for the course to be appraised both by the trainees themselves and by external means (Appendix N). Where continuing assessments of trainees are under- taken, the results may allow modifications to be made to the course as it progresses. For hospital trainees unable to obtain release from their posts, participation in the hospital’s own postgraduate programme for general professional training may offer an acceptable alternative to the conventional release course, particularly when suitably augmented and when resourced by experienced general practitioner teachers. These trainees, and those on self-constructed programmes, could also benefit from intensive courses of one or two weeks duration, perhaps organised regionally, but taking place at the beginning of the general practice year. In some regions regular evening meetings have proved acceptable to trainees, and these may be held in the homes or practice premises of local general practitioners. In some schemes a general practitioner trainer is nominated as the trainee’s “‘tutor’’ and maintains contact with him throughout the period of hospital training.