News and opportunities May 2019

Firstly, congratulations and a massive thank you to LJ who has now moved on to her first consultant job south of river – she has done an incredible amount of work for the North East Thames programme, including the RespNET website which was her brainchild.

Training Days

There is a busy time coming up with a number of training days in the calendar:

• North Middlesex this Friday (17^th May) – no sign-up link yet
• Whittington on Wed 5^th June – no sign-up link yet
• While no longer formally part of the North East rotation, we also have the Basildon pulmonary physiology training day on 10^th July (please see email address here to confirm your place) which is usually excellent.
• 17^th July pan-London training day on vasculitis/pulmonary renal syndrome (link here)

Also close by are several training days at Kings which North East trainees are welcome to attend – currently these are planned for Tues 10^th September and Tues 8^th October, with topics TBC.

For GIM training there is a programme of 4-6pm (see previous post for dates and sign-up links) and a number of GIM registrar simulation training days at the Homerton (link here).

Achievements

Congratulations to Nikesh Devani and Swapna Mandal who won the BMJ Award 2019 in the Diagnostics category for their work on the community outreach OSA pathway. Here is the BMJ article describing their work.

Recent trainee publications cover topics including telehealth for COPD (Shumonta Quaderi) and the use of blood transcriptomics in TB contacts (Rishi Gupta). Rishi also gave an excellent presentation of his work at UCL’s World TB 2019 which live streamed to centres in three continents! There is also a NET presence at the ATS in Dallas next week with several abstracts from Mamta Ruparel on opportunities in lung cancer screening and TB genetic heteroresistance from Camus Nimmo.

Representation

A lot of time on the GIM training committee recently has been taken up with planning for the introduction of IMT (Internal Medicine Training) to replace CMT. As you may know, ST3 will now become part of CMT, and trainees will usually do two six month reg jobs in different specialities as an opportunity to get a broader internal medicine experience before starting a speciality training programme. The first IMT3 year will be in 2021, after which respiratory trainees will therefore be doing a four-year (rather than five-year programme). As a result 20% of the NET registrar training posts will be reallocated to IMT3 trainees.

There are GIM (and probably respiratory) training committee meetings coming up in June, so please let Camus, Anita or Kher know if there is anything you would like us to feed back, e.g. ARCP/study leave problems or indeed any other issues.