The UK Faculty of Intensive Care Medicine: Collaborating for Quality

Abstract

The Founders of the UK’s Intensive Care Society (ICS) would have been gratified to discover that forty years later the discipline they promoted and practised had become a primary specialty with an active multidisciplinary clinical community, a rapidly expanding portfolio of research and quality improvement activities, a high-quality case mix programme, and a multi-collegiate Faculty. Since the Faculty was founded in October last year, we have obtained General Medical Council (GMC) approval for the new single-certificate of completion of training (CCT) training programme, gathered the support of the Conference of Postgraduate Medical Deans (COPMeD) and the Department of Health (DH) to expand training numbers, set up the system for national recruitment to training, joined with the ICS to support the Society’s work on developing national standards for Intensive Care Medicine (ICM), and have received more than 1,000 applications for Foundation Fellowship. We have benefitted from strong support from the Royal Colleges, in particular the Royal College of Anaesthetists, and from our dedicated and expert Faculty administrative staff. In this editorial we will describe the Faculty’s work programme and what we hope to achieve over the next few years. The new ICM training programme Our first and most important goal was to complete the work of the Faculty’s predecessor, the Intercollegiate Board (IBTICM), in developing the new ICM training programme 1 and to obtain GMC approval for ICM as a single-CCT primary specialty training programme. Our task was facilitated by the prior excellent work of the IBTICM, and their decision to base the UK programme on the international programme CoBaTrICE, which has a strong research foundation and extensive clinician, patient, and public participation. We have established working groups with all the partner specialties to determine the extent of shared competencies between ICM and other programmes, so that we can calculate the likely duration of training for trainees wanting dual certification in two programmes each of five years from ST3 appointment. We anticipate that the minimum additional time required will be 18 months – thus a minimum total training time of 8.5 years for anaesthesia, and longer for some medical specialties. Training posts With the expert advice of our Implementation Working Group and the Faculty Regional Advisors (RAs) we then started work with COPMeD and the DH to determine the number of training posts we might need, and the processes for recruitment to ICM training. Given the longer duration of training for the new programme, we will need to increase the number of ICM training posts from around 120 to more than 200 to maintain the current supply of specialists, with more required to meet an anticipated expansion in demand as intensive care services expand. Additional posts for ICM training have been identified by Deaneries working with the RAs and with local Trusts, in part through conversion of nontraining posts. We anticipate that around 50-60 new ICM training posts can be created in this way for 2012, with more to follow over the coming years. Recruitment processes and applying for ICM training