TRAINEE UPDATE

New trainee representative

In the recent SAM elections, there were three nominations for trainee representative, and we are pleased to announce that Kirk Freeman was the successful candidate. Kirk is an ST6 trainee in the Wales Deanery, and will be taking over from Alice when her term ends in May 2012. He will also be helping out over the next few months while Amy is on maternity leave.

SAM conferences

Thanks to all of you who joined us at SAM’s 5th International Meeting at Imperial College in London at the end of September. As usual, there was excellent attendance by trainees from all corners of the country, many of whom actively contributed by displaying posters and speaking at some of the parallel sessions.

If you were unable to attend, you can find copies of the conference presentations (including those from the trainee session) on the SAM website – just go to and click on the Past Conferences bar on the right of the homepage.

The next meeting will be held at the Radisson Blu Hotel in Dublin on 3rd and 4th May. You can register for this meeting, and submit your abstracts, through the SAM website as usual. Our plan for the trainee session at this meeting is to hold a forum about Acute Medicine training, and specialist skills training in particular. Members of the SAM council and the Acute Medicine SAC present to give information about skills training and answer any questions you may have. We hope this will be a productive session, so please start formulating your queries now.

Certificate of completion of training wording

In September the GMC finally resolved the CCT wording issues that have been troubling us for the past year or so. They have now accepted that those of us on the 2007 GIM (Acute) curriculum should have our qualification in Acute Medicine formally recognised. The table below shows the CCT wording for each curriculum currently in existence:

Curriculum title / Wording on CCT
Pre-2003: GIM / CCT in GIM and subspecialty of Acute Medicine
2007: GIM (Acute) / CCT in GIM and subspecialty of Acute Medicine
2009: AIM single certification / CCT in AIM
2009: AIM & GIM dual certification / CCT in GIM and AIM

If you followed the 2007 GIM (Acute) curriculum and have been awarded a CCT in GIM only, you can apply to the GMC to have this changed to include subspecialty of Acute Medicine. Please contact Cathy Williams at the GMC () in the first instance.

We appreciate that this issue has caused considerable upset to some of you, but hopefully we have now reached a satisfactory endpoint.

Curriculum news

Both the AIM and the GIM curricula have been recently been updated by the JRCPTB. The changes are due to be ratified shortly by the GMC, and once this has occurred, the updated curricula will be visible on the ePortfolio. The changes include some new common competences on the GIM curriculum, most of which will also transfer to the AIM curriculum as well. Acute kidney injury has also been added to the AIM curriculum as a new “top presentation”. In addition, there will be some amendments in the procedural competences section, in line with recent changes in the CMT curriculum.

Trainees are always concerned that curricular changes will require a lot of extra work, but on this occasion, it is unlikely that any additional training will be needed to fulfil the new competences.

In the future, the JRCPTB will undertake yearly rolling curricular updates rather than performing a major curriculum rewrite every three years. Trainees within the final 18 months of their training will be exempt from any major changes.

Assessment news

The JRCPTB are also working on some alterations to the assessment structure for medical trainees of all grades. Workplace based assessment templates will be redesigned to allow more feedback to be given, and the numbers of assessments required will also be changing. More information can be found in the recent JRCPTB newsletter:

Along with these changes, ARCP decision aids will be updated, so that it is clear to trainees exactly what is expected of them at each stage of their training. In addition, the ePortfolio is being streamlined to make things easier for both trainees and their supervisors. We will let you know when we have more news from the JRCPTB – but for the moment, please keep working to the current frameworks.

Amy

Kirk

Alice

SAM trainee representatives