In praise of deaneries.

If you look at the foot of this article, you will see that my address is given as the London Deanery. This is possibly appearing there for the last time. I am not retiring just yet, but the structure of our institution is about to change, and possibly the name will do so too. This gives me an opportunity to write about deaneries, and why they have been such a force for good. In case you are unsure, deaneries are departments of postgraduate medical and dental education. Each is headed by a postgraduate dean, and they are called deaneries for the simple reason that it is easier than spelling out the full designation which is a bit of a mouthful and has 30 consonants in it. They have nothing at all to do with religion, which confuses people who have only heard the word before to describe the place where the dean of a cathedral lives. Every region in the UK has a deanery. Some also look after postgraduate education for other health professions, including nurses. Each deanery is affiliated to a university, but its funding comes entirely from the National Health Service (NHS). If you are a junior doctor, a deanery will manage your training from the moment you graduate from medical school until the day you receive full accreditation as a specialist or a general practitioner (GP), usually a period of between 5 and 8 years. The London Deanery looks after around 12 000 young doctors during this phase of their lives, organising their recruitment into foundation or specialty training posts, allocating their placements in hospitals or the community, reviewing their career progression and awarding them certificates when they complete their training. We also look after their clinical teachers—several thousand of them—trying to make sure that they have adequate training and are properly equipped to act as clinical and educational supervisors. I could easily spend the rest of this article expatiating on the many and varied functions that deaneries carry out, but you can find this out from their websites, including the excellent one from the London Deanery. I could also go into a great deal of detail about how deaneries have merged, demerged or re-merged over the past decade, and how they have had to adapt their functions according to political fashion and ministerial dictates, but you can find this information elsewhere too. 3 It would detract from understanding the essence of a deanery’s role. We are, to use a phrase coined by our much-loved outgoing dean ‘doctors to doctors’, in the educational rather than the clinical sense. We look after young doctors as they pass through their years of postgraduate training.