Paediatric Cardiology

Paediatric cardiology has traditionally included care of patients of all ages with congenital heart disease. Many of these patients require lifelong follow up, leading to a most rewarding, close and long term relationship with patients and their families. Higher medical training in paediatric cardiology has maintained its openness to trainees from either a paediatric or an adult medicine background, although a solid basis of both paediatrics and cardiology (adult or paediatric) is essential for entry into specialist training. Skill requirements for training in congenital cardiology have gradually become less rigid, but paediatric or medical experience up to the level of achievement of MRCPCH or MRCP remains essential. Perhaps the most important attribute of any budding paediatric cardiologist is highly developed skill in communication.

The specialty has changed considerably over the last ten years. In the past it has been expected that a paediatric cardiologist should be capable of dealing with every aspect of congenital heart disease from fetal to adult life with skills ranging from clinical cardiology to cardiac ultrasound and a wide variety of invasive skills such as pacemaker implantation and cardiac catheterisation. Whilst being an expert in all or most of the superspecialties of the field had its attractions, increasing complexity of superspecialization has made such practice obsolete. Modern training in paediatric cardiology reflects these changes and the needs of patients. The new training curriculum, which we hope, will be introduced in 2006 aims to produce trainees who, at the end of a 3-year program, are competent “general” paediatric cardiologists. This entails competence at assessment and immediate management of acute and chronic congenital heart disease with referral to a superspecialist when appropriate – in other words, the great majority of everyday clinical care of patients with congenital heart disease.  It is no longer desirable nor achievable to train all paediatric cardiologists in the superspecialties (cardiac catheterisation, electrophysiology, fetal cardiology, specialist imaging, transplantation management, pulmonary hypertension management and adult congenital heart disease). Those trainees wishing to continue in superspecialty training after the 3 year period of general cardiology training will compete for nationally approved superspecialty training posts, which will be of variable duration depending upon the specific superspecialty.

These changes in training and service provision in congenital cardiology, particularly the removal of the previously obligatory requirement for a very high level of manual dexterity in the catheterisation laboratory, should prove appealing to a wide variety of trainees.

Due to regular revisions, arising from changes in the training environment and the requiremetns of the PMETB, the JRCPTB are currently running various curricula for trainees in each specialty.  All relevant curricula are listed at the bottom of this page under Documents.  Use the filter option on the right-hand side, together with the guidance notes below,  to help you select the correct document.  In summary:

• If you are a run-through (Specialty Registrar [StR]) trainee, you will follow the curricula tagged as ST3+  

• If you are an ‘old style’ SpR, you are following the curricula tagged as SpR

• If you enrolled prior to 01/01/03, you will be following the original curricula which are no longer available for download, see note below

 
Competence Based Curricula – StRs

PMETB has received the assessment system (blueprint and RITA/ARCP grid) for Paediatric Cardiology and this has been approved. 

The assessment blueprints show the possible methods that can be used to assess each of the competences in the curriculum. Trainees and trainers should refer to the blueprints for guidance on the appropriate assessment methods for each aspect of the curriculum, and so plan the training programme according to the criteria set by the RITA Decision Aid. It is not expected that all competences will be assessed by all methods, rather that there will be a sampling of competences within a variety of settings, both within formal and workplace-based assessment, from which overall competence acquisition has to be determined.

 Acute care common stem (Medicine) trainees will also follow the ACCS training manual.

Competence Based Curricula – SpR (for trainees enrolling after 1 Jan 2003)

The JCHMT introduced revised curricula for all the medical specialties together with a generic curriculum that applied to all trainees back in 2003. These are competence-based and set out the knowledge, skills and attitudes to be acquired by trainees before they may be awarded a CCT. 

Curricula (for trainees enrolling before 1 Jan 2003)