STAND UP AND BE COUNTED

I really liked this quick response letter to an anonymously authored piece recently published in the BMJ. The subject is the lack of teaching for junior docs.  I had to reproduce it in full.

Do we have the appetite for a Medical Reformation?
Christoph C Lees, Consultant Obstetrician
NHS University Teaching Hospital, Cambridge
The anonymous author of this piece has hit the nail on the head, but what are we to do?
Rather than pontificate in prose, I'll put down a series of key phrases that most of us will recognise as going some way to redressing the balance: Consultant teaching rounds, on call rotas (as opposed to elaborately constructed shifts), resurrecting the firm structure, team cameraderie, supervision, steep learning curve, rapid acquisition of clinical skills, apprenticeship, renounce EWTD, bedside teaching.
To move towards such a world would require, as happened in the late Middle Ages in Europe (then in a religious context), nothing less than a Reformation. It would require that the Royal Colleges regain their primacy in determining standards and directing postgraduate education; it would require that Doctors renounce their corporate allegiances as de facto civil servants. And it would require the GMC to tear iself from its comfortable position as a Department of health quasi-quango.
Are Doctors willing to stand up and be counted, as the President of the RCS and some other brave souls have recently done-or to push the analogy even further, as Martin Luther did in Wittenberg in 1517? The prize would be an independent profession-and the beneficiary would be our patients.
Competing interests: None declared

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