Academic Skills Training for Young General Practitioners: the New London Academic Training Scheme (LATS)

Summary

This paper describes work in progress in evaluating the London Academic Training Scheme or LATS. A group of young doctors, just past speciality training in general practice, are employed for a training course in academic general practice for one year. The aim of this project is to attract doctors to general practice in London and to academic medicine. The first year of this scheme has twelve LATS registrars attached to eight departments of general practice and twelve clinical attachments. The evaluation so far indicates that they are choosing academic medicine as a career choice although perhaps not in London. The LATS registrars started unconfident in research methodology and teaching. They identify professional development and skills acquisition as the main benefits of being on the course. They have been very critical of the formal teaching and have found the informal course very helpful. All have reached data gathering stage with their research, eleven have data collected, six have data analysed, with one paper written, two posters and one paper accepted at conferences and one computer assisted learning programme. There appears to be less of an emphasis on recruitment for London than for academia, and for research over teaching. The evaluation continues.