Full Time Trainees
A session is 4 hours and so the working week can be divided into 10 sessions.
Clinical Work
Seven of these sessions or 28 hours should be undertaking clinical work.
Clinical work includes surgery, visits, and administration, practice business meetings. It DOES NOT mean a registrar should do seven surgeries.
Three sessions or 12 hours should be devoted to education. Educational sessions include the half-day release, updating the e-portfolio, reading, and protected time for tutorials, practice educational meetings. Educational sessions can include patient contact time for example COTs, attending an outpatient session, sitting with another doctor or clinic.
Outside of term time for the half-day or modular study days the free educational session is an opportunity for the trainee to further gain some competencies. This time can fruitfully be used for an agreed educational plan that could be clinical (e.g. attending an ENT clinic) or educational (e.g. undertaking an audit)
Less Than Full Time Trainees
A 60% trainee works 60% of the week, i.e 3 days. It therefore takes 20 months to complete the equivalent of 12 months of full time training
Every five weeks a 60% trainee will complete the same training commitment as a 100% trainee will complete over 3 weeks.
Every 3 weeks a full time trainee has 3x7 = 21 clinical sessions and 3x3 =9 educational sessions.
It follows therefore, that every five weeks a 60% trainee will also expect 21 clinical sessions and 9 educational sessions.
If a 60% trainee has 4 clinical sessions (16 hours) each week they will need to undertake a further clinical session of 4 hours every 5 weeks to make up the required clinical sessions.
You should average 2 educational sessions a week (8 hours) of which VTS afternoons make up 4 hours. To make up the numbers every fifth week drop an educational session and replace it with the missing clinical session.
9 educational sessions over 5 weeks = 45 hours of education. 20 hours of which are taken up by VTS afternoons (so you are getting more VTS afternoons proportionally than a full time trainee). This leaves you 25 hours of educational time in the practice. This should be split equally between self study and onsite protected teaching activities. This works out at 2.5 hours a week of each.
This might work out as 1hr of tutorial a week and 1.5 hours of feedback time, COTS, ad hoc teaching and 2.5 hours of self study. (Remember in the fifth week you will only be entitled to 1 hour of educational time as you will be doing an extra clinical session to make up your clinical time)
A 80% trainee works 80% of the week, i.e 4 days. It take 15 months to complete 12 months of WTE training
Every four weeks a 80% trainee will complete the same training commitment as a 100% trainee will complete over 3 weeks.
In 3 weeks a 100% has 3x7 = 21 clinical sessions and 3x3 =9 educational sessions.
It follows therefore, that every four weeks an 80% trainee will also expect 21 clinical sessions and 9 educational sessions.
If this trainee has 5 clinical sessions each week and attends VTS everyweek, they would have practice educational activity each week and personal study time each week, except for the forth week when they would need to have an extra clinical session (6) and only one educational session in addition to VTS, this could be tutorial one month and personal study the next. Given clincal practice is essential to being a GP and crucial for suceess at CSA, it is important to ensure clinical time is not lost.