What about vocational training?

Thank you for your letter enquiring about the pros and cons of vocational training for general practice. While you have most of your preregistration year ahead of you, it is not too soon to start to think about your future plans. You are quite right in thinking that, at present, you will be perfectly entitled to seek entry into general practice as soon as you are fully registered. While there are still those who believe that this is the best way to become a family doctor, only about ten per cent of new entrants do so. Were you to join them, I am quite sure that at first, with your hospital experience fresh in your mind, you would find yourself clinically able to cope. Value of vocational training However, as your hospital experience receded you would need to be in ideal circumstances, and a rather exceptional person, not to find your clinical competence falling off. This would to some extent be offset by increasing confidence in handling general-practice situations, but this experience needs an adequate foundation of knowledge to be effective. You would run the risk of becoming one of those young general practitioners who come to me sometimes to say "General practice has nothing more to offer me" when, if the truth be faced, they surely mean "I have nothing more to offer general practice" ? The numbers of people applying for places on vocational schemes show in themselves that a growing body of recent graduates believes that if general practice is worth considering as a career, it is as worth being trained for as any other specialty or discipline. One needs a 'first stage' of basic medical knowledge to get launched into any medical career; a 'second stage' of specific postgraduate training in order to achieve one's chosen orbit; and a 'third stage' of continuing medical education in order to maintain a satisfactory course. If we stick to the second stage in this letter, this is what the vocational schemes are all about. I enclose an information sheet summarising those at present in action.the list is constantly being revised as new courses are introduced. You will see that they vary in detail, but follow basically the same pattern of two years (sometimes one) in a succession of hospital posts, and one year in all as a trainee practitioner. Hospital posts Your question about the validity of the hospital …