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Resources for Trainees - primarily educational

Trainees with something distinctive to offer. See below.

Our Trainers page has useful links to information on guidance, regulations, curriculum, assessment etc. and some pointers to what to expect from the relationship with your educational supervisor.

Your educational supervisor is your mentor through clinical training. He/she has the responsibility of ensuring that you know what you are supposed to do and have the opportunities to achieve all that is necessary. During each attachment a supervising consultant will be your clinical supervisor. If you go out of centre, someone in your host unit will be nominated to fulfill that role and return reports etc as required.

Trainees, including LATs and FTTAs, should register with the JRCPTB online The Training Programme Director should sign the Educational Approval form. There is a lot more information on the JRCPTB website, see the links from our trainers page.

Induction

There are Trust inductions about fire precautions, prescribing, child protection etc that you should be subjected to when you arrive. Very importantly there are a number of unit-specific and renal-specific things too.

Unit protocols are listed at www.edren.org/handbook
An Induction document that tells you such things as what to do if phoned about a high potassium after a clinic, and much more

Make sure you have looked through these/got a copy of the document. Ask if you aren't given when you arrive. You should also meet your Educational Supervisor as early as possible. If you don't know who that is, contact the TPD.

Knowledge content of the curriculum

You'll be worrying about the Exam already. Discuss carefully when to take that. Essentially, too early and it's an awful lot of work. Better to read things up as you go along. Leave it too late and you risk delaying progression if you fail it, and that would be embarrassing. The content should be covered in

Local teaching
Other resources - there are books, for example. Feehally and Johnson is excellent. UpToDate is outstanding but more of a look-it-up-when-you-encounter-it resource. Other things on the way. You should also look at our own educational resource list at OpenMed - bit.ly/openmedrenal - and where there's a gap, discuss how to fill it.
The Advanced Nephrology Course? But the level of the course is a good bit higher than the exam. See Study Leave, below.

Apart from the curriculum, what else should I be doing?

See cartoon above, and read this information about the desirable end product from our trainers page.

I fancy a spell of doing something else

Great idea - see paragraph above. The options include research, educational experience/qualifications, quality improvement, unusual specialist experience, overseas experience ... and other great ideas that you think of. Discuss these with whoever you think is best - it won't necessarily be your formal educational supervisor, but often they will have ideas about who to ask. Ask more than one person and think it out carefully.

Study leave

The deanery/NES provides forms for this which must be approved by your clinical service director and by the training programme director. This process is to seek educational approval and confirmation that the clinical service can cope. The budget to support training is exhaustable and the TPD is responsible for making sure that it is administered fairly. The amounts available to TPDs have not increased but costs have risen steeply. There is some further information on study leave policies on the NES website (search for 'Study leave')

In 2011 the Training Committee agreed that the following, not exhaustive list of courses and occasions should receive top priority for study leave, and where possible for funding from the study leave budget.

The Advanced Nephrology Course is accepted as ‘the course’ that defines knowledge to be a consultant. May be served up in two parts or one mega-binge. Very expensive, may cost 2x the average study leave budget per trainee, so expect rich and lean years, and only to get to go once during training. Need to decide when - in many ways best suited to late in training, thought the exam is clouding people's view of this a bit. Info from the Renal Association website. You should certainly join the Renal Association by the way, for its news, meetings, and professional guidance. It is cheaper to join as a trainee.
Renal Association or equivalent UK meeting (e.g. BTS, BRS) - we will try to prioritise attending this type of meeting at least twice during training. Priority given to those presenting something. You'll be expected to make every effort to get scholarship support, use trainee discounts, and we'll fund as much of it as we can afford, starting with registration fee.
Major international meetings with the ASN and World Congress of nephrology or equivalent meetings at the top of the list. High priority for study leave if you are presenting, but unfortunately we cannot offer any funding from the study leave budget.
Specialist dialysis or transplantation or similar, maybe x1 during training. As these are often heavily supported by industry we don't expect to contribute much towards them, but please discuss with the TPD if that's not true.
One other specialist course e.g. histopathology, home HD? Case by case.
Practical skills etc e.g. Renal resuscitation, ultrasound, (most are local)
Management, communication, etc courses - usually Local, and where highly rated local courses are available we won't be keen to give extravagant financial support to external ones, but you can still make a good case for the study leave.