This month we are focusing on the work of the West Midlands region from the perspective of Paarul Prinja, one of our college tutors. Paarul reflects on her achievements following her appointment to the role mid-pandemic.
I work as a consultant acute and obstetric physician at the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust and I was appointed as college tutor alongside Dr Chris Wharton in August 2020. It has been a challenging time due to the implementation of internal medicine training (IMT) against the background of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Many of our aspirations have had to be tempered by COVID-19 rotas and social distancing but we have still managed to implement many educational opportunities over the last year. Our teaching programme is now fully virtual. Each session is a mix of didactic learning, case-based teaching and ‘what would you do as the medical registrar’ scenarios. While the feedback has been excellent, we look forward to more face-to-face learning in the future.
We have successfully developed an educational supervisor faculty and hold well-attended local faculty group meetings. We have appointed associate college tutors from both IMT and higher specialist training programmes, who work very closely with us and facilitate junior doctor forums.
As college tutors, the relationships we have made with our consultant colleagues have helped us develop quality improvement training for our trainees and trainers. Similarly, we have developed an MRCP exam faculty who work tirelessly to support trainees through their membership.
The pandemic has thrown up challenges and we are currently in the process of implementing a recovery programme for trainees which includes procedural and extra outpatient clinic experience. We are running the regional IMT simulation programme and simulation sessions ‘THRIVE’ and ‘STRIVE’ for IMT2s stepping up to IMT3.
On reflection, this first year as a college tutor has been a valuable development experience for me. The relationships I have made with colleagues and trainees have helped improve the quality of training and patient care. It has also helped me to maintain my own wellbeing during this difficult time.
Future work in our trust includes developing IMT stage 2 training locally, and we look forward to welcoming two chief registrars from August 2021.
Facts and figures for the West Midlands
Here are some key facts and figures for the West Midlands region (correct at July 2020):
- 12 hospital trusts, and 18 hospitals (some trusts are multi-site) have college tutors
- 117 IMT1/2 trainees
- 330 higher medicine trainees
- two regional advisers (currently there is a job share in place for one role and we are in the process of appointing someone to the other role)
- 27 college tutors and 36 associate college tutors, 32 of which have been appointed in the past 12 months
- 41% of RCP members in the region are from Black, Asian or minority ethnic backgrounds (compared with 32% for the whole RCP membership)
- 11 chief registrars based across the region in 2021/20
- 91 applications for the RCP regional poster competition 2021
- the 2021 Turner-Warwick lecturer for West Midlands was Dr Ayman Bannaga from University Hospital Coventry and Warwickshire NHS Trust.
If you are interested in taking on a college tutor role in the West Midlands please visit our webpage.
One of the roles of college tutors is to help with the arrangements when your hospital is selected for an RCP trust visit. In November 2020 the Royal Wolverhampton NHS Trust took part in a virtual trust visit from the RCP president and RCP registrar.
The visits aim to be supportive to the clinicians working at the site and usually consist of time with trainees, consultants, SAS doctors and other staff, including physician associates where relevant and the trust executive.
Dr Jonathan Odum, chief medical officer at the Royal Wolverhampton Trust said, ‘Doctors of all grades enjoyed the opportunity to meet the president and have their voices heard on a national and local stage and receive supportive feedback. It was reassuring for everyone to hear that the challenges we face are being experienced elsewhere and to share learning.
As a trust we look forward to these visits as an opportunity to showcase our dedicated doctors in training and supervisors who support them and to have that recognised by the RCP was very welcome after a challenging year.'