Promoting General Practice as a career

Health Education England are keen to develop a cohesive, regionally agreed approach to promoting general practice as a career, starting with school students and progressing through to qualified doctors.

We have recently launched a consultation exercise to get feedback on our overall strategy and are eagerly awaiting responses from this. In the meantime, we are keen to share with you a flavour of the work we have already started.

Taster weeks

We are looking to facilitate taster weeks for both school students and Foundation doctors by creating a central register of general practices willing to host these taster weeks and providing the practices with the resources they need to make it as easy as possible.

To this end, we are developing information packs for both types of taster weeks and are working closely with the Foundation School to improve the administrative support for the placements.

Careers advice

We are keen to make it as easy as possible for schools to find local GPs willing to provide careers advice for their pupils by encouraging as many GPs as possible to volunteer through the Inspiring the Future website. To date we have 7 volunteer GPs from the east registered and our target is to reach over 150 by December 2016 so please visit the website, it only takes a few minutes to register and the commitment is just one hour of your time per year.

Dr Dirk Pilat FRCGP, PgDipGp (Otago), BSc Open - Medical Director for E-Learning, RCGP said:

Signing up is a doddle, and I had lovely morning in a local primary school. Great kids and teachers and really good questions.

Careers talks

We are encouraging GP educators to become more involved with the Foundation Trainee Teaching Programme as well as to become more involved with careers talks at their local hospital education centre.

To help facilitate this careers work, we are running 2 competitions to develop age-relevant promotional material for careers work with school students and with qualified doctors. The closing date for these competitions is 20 May 2016 with the prizes due to be awarded at the School Of Primary Care Open Day on 6 June 2016.

We hope to update you with more information on our work as it progresses.