Being a doctor at CNTW

The trust is home to many different departments that can offer training opportunities.

It hosts the Regional Affective Disorders service, which is one of the limited tertiary services in the UK to provide inpatient and outpatient services for complex affective disorders.

Other specialist services include the neuropsychiatry service, Regional Eating Disorders service (REDS), perinatal service, Gender Dysphoria service, mental health and deafness service, Complex Neurodevelopmental Disorder service, Adult ADHD service and a very well established academic unit and research and development department.

We have received some outstanding feedback for the clinical and educational supervision our trainers provide in Foundation Training. This makes CNTW one of the few trusts that are a “positive outlier” in the GMC trainee survey in 2013-2014.

All of our Foundation Year 1 supervisors are Educational Supervisors within the Foundation Program scheme, participate in ARCP panels and are well versed in Foundation e-porftolio and curriculum requirements.

We support all our Foundation trainees to engage in Clinical Governance opportunities, such as audits and service evaulations. There have been several audits that Foundation trainees have completed individually or with other core trainees in their placements here. We aim to develop a dedicated section for Foundation trainees in the Trust Medical Development Day that will include poster presentations, presentations of other outstanding achievement, etc.

Examples of completed audit projects by Foundation trainees are available from our audit department.

Foundation trainees will be encouraged to participate in other available opportunities, such as the Communication skill courses, psychotherapy supervision/Balint groups – some of which are specifically targeted towards Foundation and GP trainees.

We have well organised Post Graduate Case Conference and Journal Club Programmes and sessions running across the trust. It is mandatory for each trainee to attend these sessions, which are bleep-free and provide opportunities to learn from cases in different psychiatric specialities. All trainees will have the opportunity to present in this forum.

Our trust has received excellent feedback from Foundation school visits that have highlighted several areas of good practice.

Life as a doctor at CNTW

At CNTW we have approximately 315 medical staff working in a wide variety of services for mental health, learning disability, neuro-rehabilitation and forensic services, as well as specialist services for adults with refractory affective disorders, eating disorders, young people with affective disorders, psychotherapy services, neuropsychiatry, a mother and baby inpatient service and drug and alcohol services for both adults and young people.

The Medical Education Department has a strong culture of support, development and learning for all medical staff from work experience students to consultants preparing for retirement. All new consultants and speciality doctors receive a structured induction to the Trust and are provided with a mentor.

Appraisal is firmly established with an electronic database and all consultants and speciality doctors have access to Continuing Professional Development (CPD), multisource feedback and information about their clinical activity to feed into the process. CPD events are run regularly in response to demand and give the opportunity for consultants to use their teaching skills as well as learn from others. Opportunities for developing expertise in research, teaching and leadership (including individual coaching) are abundant. We encourage collaborative learning with other professionals from both within and outside of the Trust.