DrHippocrates

Introduction I believe that the Tooke review of Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) offers the medical profession a unique opportunity to reshape, for the better, the training of Juniors Doctors. A pause in the implementation of MMC has been enforced by the reactions to the serious problems that arose during the implementation of the specialty selection process (SSP), which involved the use of the Medical Training Application System (MTAS) software. I have been involved in Postgraduate Medical Education and the training of Junior Doctor as a Director of Medical Education since 2001, and have witness the conception, birth and growing pains of MMC. I have seen much that is good and much that was poor in the way MMC was introduced and developed, and commended the good and criticised the poor. I want to write a paper to make a personal contribution to the shaping of the future of MMC. I hope to make this easy to read and navigate. I have placed a table of contents at the head of the document...

Competencies and Competences The Gold Guide for Modernising Medical Careers (MMC) and the Foundation Curriculum and assessments are strewn with the word “Competences”. I have struggled to find a definition for “Competences” and concluded that it was a neologism, or an American equivalent of “Competencies”. I now have an answer! I have been reading “Competency Based Recruitment and Selection” by Robert Wood and Tim Payne (ISBN 0-471-97473-0, John Wiley, 1998). Competencies were first described in detail by Boyatzis and are to do with “an underlying characteristic of a person which results in an effective and or superior performance in a job”. He described 21 competencies, each with three levels Motive and trait Self image and social role Skill Thus someone with competency in efficiency is motivated by a need for high achievement “I want our hospital to do loads of operations with few complications”, has a self image of “I am efficient” or “I can do better” and a social role of a team mo...

I plan to use this Blog to publish some of my thinking about being a Doctor in the 21st Century in the great tradition dating back to the times of Hippocrates. In many ways we have lost our way, fogetting that medicine is based on a near perfect mixture of science and compassion. Compassion without science is quackery. Science without compassion is impersonal. Yet those who come forward now follow in this tradition, and my hopes for the future of Medicine in the UK has been raised by the Juniors marching against the MTAS system for selection in March 2007. They were marching and demonstrating for the best patient care, against a Government bent on continuing with a process that was omitting some of the best scientists and most humane from the selection of future seniors. I have been a Consultant (Attending) since 1993. I owe my learning to my school teachers, my tutors at Oxford University, my colleague students at King's College Hospital, and many wise clinicians subsequently. The...