More time in General Practice
We strongly believe that the place to learn about General Practice is in General Practice. That is why we are very pleased to have been the first General Practice Training Scheme in the Eastern Region to be able to offer a 3 year training programme, 18 months of which is spent in general practice rather than the usual 12 months. This has been happening for many years now and we are very pleased to be able to continue to offer this opportunity. The other half of the scheme is spent in four different hospital posts in the West Suffolk Hospital.
We redeveloped the scheme in August 2007 and have been gradually expanding trainee capacity since then. We will be taking 14 trainees a year from August 2011. In the first year of the scheme, 7 trainees will start with a general practice placement whilst the other 7 trainees will do a 6 month post in either Palliative Medicine, A&E, Medicine or Paediatrics. These 2 groups will then swap over, with those starting with a hospital post going into general practice and vice versa.
During the second year, all 14 trainees will do 3 hospital posts, all of 4 months duration. The posts involved will be a selection of Medicine, A&E, O&G, Paediatrics, Ophthalmology, ENT and psychiatry.
The final year will be spent back in general practice again, this time at a different practice. We try to arrange for you to spend time in a town as well as a country practice so that you can experience both working environments.
Those trainees who don't have a Paediatric post as part of their formal rotation are offered the chance to have a taster fortnight in Paediatrics during their first year GP placement. The idea of this is to give you exposure to the sick child as well as gain some clinic experience.
The ST2 year hospital posts are in fixed rotations but we do ask you for your preferences and try to acommodate those as much as we can. We will also attempt to be flexible about your preferred first year hospital post as well as which practices you are placed in, taking into account where you will be living etc. Usually this works out okay with most trainees getting their 1st or 2nd choices. One of the programme directors will be in touch with all the successful applicants shortly after you have been appointed so that we can start discussions on who would prefer which posts. We aim to give you a defined 3 year rotation within 2 months of you being appointed to the scheme (so well before you start work work in August 2011) so that you know where you will be working when. However, these rotations are not written in stone. We do appreciate that there can be good reasons for change, the commonest of which being maternity leave.
We are in the process of drawing up defined learning objectives for each hospital post and we hope that these will be available by the early spring of 2011. The idea of these is for you to have an idea of what you can expect from each post in your rotation and to give you goalposts to work towards.
We are very fortunate to have this website as our online learning community. You are able to see the visitor section of the website which we hope you will find helpful. Members of the scheme have a unique log-in password and are able to access the other areas of the website. We use this for sharing information, storing presentations etc. We are always looking for ideas to develop this further.
if you are going to work with children you are required to disclose any record of convictions, bind-over orders or cautions against you as an appendix to your application.