GPs help to train London doctors

London University medical schools are collaborating with GPs in a Pounds 20-million education programme to help improve undergraduate teaching.

Moves for more community medical education are taking place throughout the country because of the increase in day surgery and the shortening of time patients spend in hospital for acute illnesses.

The Department of Health is giving London University medical faculty Pounds 10 million a year over the next two years for an initiative in which GPs will be trained to teach undergraduates in the community. They will also be helped in their own professional development by academic departments and tutor networks.

The programme will be run by the North and South Thames offices of the National Health Service executive, which take over responsibility in April from the London Implementation Group for supervising healthcare changes in the capital.

Paul Wallace, professor of primary health care at the Royal Free Medical School, said that key schools in North Thames were collaborating over the curriculum, teaching methods and assessment.

"The idea is that if you can teach students about medicine in the context of the community, they will have a much more realistic view than the increasingly distorted view from a teaching hospital," he said. "But the problem is how you achieve this shift. One of the questions is logistics. For example, we're looking at video conferencing links, so that one GP could address students on three or four sites."

Sean Hilton, professor of general practice and primary care at St George's Hospital Medical School, said that medical schools in South Thames would be involved in setting up resource centres offering modular courses to GPs who could not travel to academic departments. The centres' work would include courses to train GPs how to teach.

"The involvement of inner city practitioners in teaching has been relatively limited up until now, and this funding offers us the opportunity to increase it in London," he said.