Basildon Hospital

Basildon Hospital is a busy district general hospital with well established respiratory services and onsite Essex Cardiothoracic Centre. There are two respiratory wards with a total of 55 beds. There is an eight bedded acute respiratory care unit (ARCU) where unwell patients and those requiring NIV are managed. The latest CQC rating for Basildon Hospital was “good” overall, with all departments being rated “good” or “outstanding“.

Consultant speciality interests

• Medical thoracoscopy
• Sleep and ventilation
• Lung cancer and lung cancer diagnostics such as EBUS
• ILD
• Asthma/COPD
• Cardiopulmonary exercise testing (CPEX)

There are six consultants in the department and on average, you will spend 2 months with each consultant in a typical one year rotation. There are six middle grade doctors in total including one trainee from the North East London Rotation and the other from the Eastern deanery. There are four speciality doctors (trust grade or on medical training schemes) who are quite experienced and you share clinical duties and procedures equally with them. It’s a friendly department with cohesiveness and good relations with specialist nurses/physio teams and respiratory physiologists.

Meetings

• Weekly lung cancer MDT shared with Southend Hopsital
• Weekly local radiology meeting
• Weekly clinical meeting (presentations by SpRs and juniors)
• Monthly ILD meeting
• Weekly hospital Grand Round

Bronchoscopy

• 2 x bronchoscopy lists a week, 1 SpR with 1 Consultant
• Plenty of opportunity for bronchoscopy experience, and you can expect to perform about 50 bronchoscopy procedures in a year
• 1 X EBUS list a week, attended by two consultants and one registrar. You could expect to assist/perform about 30-40 EBUS-TBNA procedures in a year. The department performs about 125-150 EBUS procedures per annum (with ther service continuing to grow) and is in the process of establishing radial EBUS.

Medical Thoracoscopy

• Facilities to perform medical thoracoscopy are available on adhoc basis though there is no regular medical thoracoscopy list. You could expect to assist/perform 10 thoracoscopies in a year.

Clinics

• 2-3 general respiratory medicine clinics a week with a good case mix. There are specialist sleep/ventilation clinics and you will have the opportunity to attend these clinics and get good experience reporting.

Pleural USS

• Dedicated respiratory department portable USS machine available 24/7
• Procedure room for pleural procedures
• Good training to work towards level 1 thoracic ultrasound competency

GIM

• Busy acute medical take, average 50-70 admissions per 24 hours. Acute medical take is well staffed by junior doctors. There is an acute ambulatory care unit which is managed by the acute medicine team. Almost 35 % of job time is spent doing acute medical on calls
• Banding 1B rota
• Enough experience to easily cover GIM curriculum requirements

Stage of training best suited to this rotation

• ST3-5, or any time for those with an interest in pleural procedures

Recent trainee comments

“I loved it as you would become independent in seldinger and surgical trains (because of medical thoracoscopy) and should perform minimum 50 Bronchs and 20-30 EBUS. Lung cancer exposure is exceptional as is sleep medicine and pulmonary physiology including CPEX with the opportunity to be taught about and report on both.”