Tag Archives: cardiology training

However, trainees may benefit from a separate relationship with a senior clinician, in which they can be nurtured outside of the auspices of a generic training curriculum. This describes mentorship: a bidirectional relationship between mentor and mentee offering personal development, independent growth, and exploration of interests, where a mentor can facilitate opportunities. The mentor’s role is multi-faceted, including that of coach, challenger, teacher and sounding board. Fundamentally, the relationship is grounded in mutual trust and support, commensurate to the needs of the mentee (figure 1). Figure 1. Differences in scope between sup

Introduction Postgraduate cardiology training in the UK consists of three years of internal medicine training followed by five years of cardiology specialty training, which comprises three years of core specialty training (ST3,4,5) and a further two years of subspecialty training (ST6,7).1,2 The current system has been developed through a series of modifications after its inception in August 2008. It is an electronic portfolio of assessments and competencies, which was launched by the UK National Health Service (NHS) in August 2005, in an effort to support the achievement and education of healthcare professionals.3 These assessments are done

Multiple skills required Cardiologists need the ability to work as leaders of, or within, teams and systems involving other healthcare professionals in order to effectively provide optimal patient care. Cardiologists generally work as hospital-based specialists and need to integrate their work with, not only community-based primary care colleagues, but also other hospital-based physicians, as well as working closely with cardiothoracic surgeons and anaesthetists and the imaging specialties, e.g. radiology and nuclear medicine. Cardiologists may work some of their time as part of acute medical admissions teams looking after emergency medical a

Introduction Over the last two years postgraduate medical training in the UK has undergone radical and controversial reform with the implementation of Modernising Medical Careers (MMC). A product of the 2002 report into reform of the Senior House Officer grade, Unfinished Business, by the chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson, the stated aim of MMC is to “drive up the quality of care for patients through reform and improvement in postgraduate medical education and training”. The broadly successful implementation of a foundation programme for newly qualified doctors in 2005 was followed by the launch of higher specialist training as �

New curriculum First of all, it is clear that there is strong support for the new curriculum. This was introduced in 2007 and comprises three years of core cardiology training followed by two years of modular sub-specialty training. The curriculum is competency based and supported by a wide range of both formative and summative work-place assessments and a knowledge-based assessment (multiple choice question exam). The Specialist Advisory Committee (SAC) has set up a subgroup with the remit of developing methods for selecting trainees into sub-specialty training and we are pleased to see that most trainees accept that this will have to be a c