People involved in your training
The three year programme will take you through a variety of different places of work. These will be distributed between primary care, secondary care and the community. These posts will be distributed between acute trusts, psychiatric trusts, primary care trusts and practices. Trainees work under the umbrella of local work groups, GP Speciality Training Schemes. These schemes will organise and run your personal programme over the three years, allocating your various posts and supervising and facilitating your training. Trainees normally remain within the same scheme for the duration of their programme. The schemes are all supervised and quality managed by the deanery.
People working for the deanery are a mixture of highly skilled administrative staff, senior managers and experienced doctors taking on different roles within your training. Some of these roles will overlap and some people, to confuse matters, undertake more than one role. Mostly trainees are adept at finding whom they need when an issue arises which requires advice. Certainly if the person you initially contact can not help they will do all they can to steer you towards whomever should be able to help.
Programme Director
Clinical Supervisor
Clinical Tutor
Trainer
Educational Supervisor
Programme Director
This is the person you will have most consistent contact with over the three years you are in training. Programme Directors are most normally experienced general practitioners and many have been trainers in the past or continue to work in this role.
They organise the posts in partnership with the secondary care consultants and local trainers. They make sure the posts are accredited for training by PMETB. They allocate new starters to the rotations they will undertake over the time they are on
the scheme and also allocate the Educational Supervisors. They will oversee the posts themselves, troubleshoot any problems as they arise, be they related to service or education, and work with clinicians involved to develop posts. They will readily undertake a pastoral role when needed. They are the local link between trainees, trainers and the central deanery offices and educational resources. They will be keen to hear your opinions on the posts you work in and how these may be improved.
Programme Directors organise the weekly teaching programme for the half day release scheme. They will make sure that over the three years the programme experience delivers the Royal College curriculum. Most schemes embark on at least one residential a year, organised by the Programme Directors. Each scheme has its own character but all are subject to quality management by the deanery.
Top
In your secondary care posts you will have a clinical supervisor. This will normally be a consultant within the department you are assigned to. They are responsible to make sure that you are trained within the specialty you are working in, that you work to a sufficiently high standard and that you achieve the competencies normally expected within that specialty for the time you work there. Departments work differently, but the clinical supervisor is ultimately responsible for any study, annual or sickness leave you have while in a post, though the administration of this may be by an administrator in the department. It is important you work out early on in an attachment and preferably even before starting whom you should contact in the event of needing planned or urgent leave or any swaps and changes to rotas.
The clinical supervisor will have to write a report about your performance and progress within their department towards the end of your attachment. They may be responsible for completing many other elements of the ePortfolio but, depending on the department, this will probably be shared with other members of the team.
This is normally a secondary care consultant with responsibility to his whole trust in this role. The clinical tutor normally is responsible for making sure the trust as a whole has an educational programme in addition to clinical service. The clinical tutor normally holds the budget for study leave and will need to be approached with any applications for this in terms of finance. Clinical tutors most often are contacted through the hospital’s post graduate training offices and many will work there for at least part of the week
Trainers are normally experienced GPs who have been approved in this role and work in practices approved for general practice training. There are a few non-GP trainers with a background in general practice work including practice management and practice nursing. For most schemes the trainers work within reasonably close proximity to the acute trust where the scheme is based though for some schemes there is a wider geographical spread. Trainers will undertake your educational supervision during the GP Registrar year, normally the ST3 attachment, of your rotation. They will also undertake this role if you participate in an ‘Innovative Training Post’. As GP Registrar you will work in the training practice alongside the trainer.
Different GP specialty training schemes have different formulas here. The Educational Supervisor will often be the trainer within the training scheme who has been appointed to be your trainer in your final GP Registrar year, throughout your three year rotation usually, one way or another, the Educational Supervisor will be a consistent figure through the three years of your training. The Educational Supervisor will write a report on your progress in training on a six monthly basis and this will be included within your ePortfolio. The Educational Supervisor will want to meet you within each post to jointly decide on the educational objectives for the attachment and monitor your progress against these outcomes. The Educational Supervisor will be there to undertake a pastoral role as well.
Top