Fit for the future? The place of global health in the UK's postgraduate medical training: a review

Hall, JA; Brown, CS; Pettigrew, L; Malik, ANJ; Watson, J; Topiwala, A; McGregor, L; Ramsay, R

The six curricula that contained global health competencies had competencies on the global burden of disease or global determinants of disease and appropriate policy responses. The global health competencies identified are shown in Table 3 Although the aim of this paper was to review the core specialty curricula, the surgical and psychiatric subspecialty curricula were also reviewed. any global health competencies. These were very similar to the global health competencies in the CEM and RCP-GIM. Table 3 compares Collegiate competencies with the proposed undergraduate global health competencies. 7 From Table 3 we can see that The Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health (RCPCH) was the only College to require all trainees to 'be aware of (understand the work of ) the World Health Organization (WHO)', or 'know the local, national and international structures for health care'. These cross-cutting competencies have applicability to all specialties. Table 3 also demonstrates that there are a number of global health topics that are not covered by any of the postgraduate curricula such as health inequalities or the mobility of and inequalities in the global health workforce. The latter is of importance not only because of concerns around staffing health facilities in lowand middle-income countries but also because many of those undertaking postgraduate training in the UK will have qualified elsewhere, and large numbers of UK doctors work overseas at some time raising issues about the regulation and registration of physicians.