I’ve spent the last few days filling in form after form after form. You’ve guessed it, I’ve been applying for ST programs and it’s a real pain in the arse.
For those of you that aren’t aware of the ST program, let me give you a little summary of how it stands at the moment.
When you graduate from a UK medical school, you have to undertake a two year ‘foundation program’. At the end if this program you should have obtained your ‘foundation competencies’.
After the foundation course comes speciality training (the ST program). There are two types of ST program; coupled and uncoupled. Some specialities offer coupled programs whereas others offer uncoupled ones.
A coupled program means that once you are in the program (assuming you pass the required exams, etc) you’ll end up a consultant in that specialty whereas an uncoupled program means that you do either two or three years of ‘core training’ and then have to compete (again) to get into higher training.
Regular readers of the blog will know that I’ve spent a lot of time deciding what career is right for me and that I’m going to try to get into ENT surgery but if this fails, I will settle for general practice.
To be an ENT surgeon, you need to get onto a ‘core surgical training’ (CST) ST program (which is a two-year, generic surgical training program), pass that and then apply for ‘run-through’ training in ENT. All of this is pretty competitive but I’m hopeful.
What I’ve applied for is CST in Bristol as well as South East Wales and GP in Bristol (as a backup). I spent about four or five hours completing forms on Monday and even longer yesterday. Fortunately, since I had completed applications for six-month jobs in ENT and ED over the last couple of weeks, I had had a reasonable amount of practice!
Interviews for surgery aren’t until March so now we play the waiting game…