11th July 2016

Surgical LFG

This week saw the Summer Surgical Local Faculty Group meeting. For the first time we were joined by Service Managers from T&O, Urology & Surgery as well as junior doctor representatives, educational supervisors and PGEC staff, for the open part of the meeting.

Angela Langwith-Green (in the middle here) our Medical Education Manager has been working tremendously hard to collate responses to the recent LETB visit and help us address issues raised in the GMC NTS Survey. Many of these issues are outwith the control of doctors and are management issues so it was great to put the problems directly to the people who can solve them.

For example, it was apparent our Service Managers felt the work was covered with few rota gaps as their mark of success was covering the on calls - they had not necessarily appreciated the impact of having daytime shifts uncovered leaving those who were there to do two or three people's work. I have asked them to return to us all rota gaps as this information doesn't seem to be going anywhere and I feel we need a baseline before the Guardian of Safe Wirking starts.

Angela is also heading up a piece of work to restructure Induction across the Trust. Departmental Induction year on year comes under fire in the GMC Survey and the LFG was useful to highlight wide variations in practice across the specialities. Sachin Agrawal and I are dragging everyone with us following the South Thames Foundation School exhaustive model for an Induction programme and whilst all the ground is covered in the Surgical Hanbook available on trustnet, if we don't verbalise it trainees don't feel it's been delivered.

That's all for now...

Short post this week, and out later than usual (apologies) as I am currently on annual leave. This means there'll be no post next week as though I'll be back I'll only have holiday snaps to report back on! Lovely for me, possibly quite dull for you... 😎