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Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust

Medical Education

 

Medical Education

First and foremost, our purpose is to improve the health and wellbeing of our patients. We, the Department of Medical Education believe that underpinning this is a firm foundation of education. Led by our Director of Medical Education, we support all areas of the trust in the delivery of education and continuing professional development to all doctors, medical students, and professional colleagues. These pages should provide you with a bit more information and if you have any questions or want to know a bit more, please do get in touch .

 

About us

Named after Sir Cyril Cripps and opened in 1974 the Cripps Postgraduate Medical Centre is in Area J and houses the PGMC administration team and offices for the Director and their team. We also have a range of meeting rooms, lecture theatres, a Technology Enhanced Learning lounge, the Doctors Mess, on-call rooms, and the Number 3 restaurant. All our teaching spaces have access to multimedia projectors or interactive screens, and audio-visual equipment enabling meetings to be streamed to other teaching spaces both on and off site. We have rooms available for 2-120 people (subject to IPC requirements), if you would like to book a space for teaching, please contact us to discuss your requirements.

 

New starters

Every year we welcome 100’s of new staff to Northampton General Hospital. Some are on a training programme as part of their foundation, core or higher training whilst others are employed directly by the trust, either as substantive staff or on a fixed term contract – this is a mixture of doctors on the Speciality Doctor contract, CESR programmes, and Locally Employed Doctors / Trust Grade doctors. We have an online induction that covers most information our new starters need and supplement this with a face-to-face session 4 times per year (August, December, February and April). This gives our new colleagues an opportunity to meet senior members of the Medical Education team alongside key staff from other departments and ask any questions. Complementing this our departments have their own local induction, some of which is hosted on our online learning platform (Moodle) , and our BAME fellow runs bespoke sessions for our International Medical Graduate (IMG) colleagues. You should receive details of your induction with the welcome pack from Medical Staffing, if you don’t then please contact Medical Staffing to confirm your contact details.

 

Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL)

We are very excited and fortunate to have a TEL lounge within the Cripps PGMC; in it we have a range of simulation and immersive technology that we can use to supplement learning that takes place in clinical environments. It is available for any of our staff to use and we are constantly looking for innovative technologies and ways to enhance the lounge. We believe that nothing can replace face to face teaching, but we also believe that simulation and immersive technologies can be used to support learning as they allow practice of rare procedures or challenging scenarios in a safe and supportive environment.
Some of the equipment we have includes:

  • Oxford Medical Simulation Virtual Reality
  • Laparoscopy trainers
  • Ultrasound trainers
  • Orthopaedic procedure trainers
  • XpertEye

 

Trainees

We welcome trainees on a range of different training programmes and work with the department education leads and college tutors to ensure that all trainees receive a valuable educational experience. We monitor this through local surveys and the national GMC survey.

 

Medical Students

We (with Kettering General Hospital) are part of the University Hospitals of Northamptonshire and welcome students from the University of Leicester and the University of Oxford as part of their rotational clinical placements. Each cohort receives their own induction and has dedicated points of contact within the medical education team.

 

Electives

If you are a student studying at another British university and would like to undertake an elective placement with us, contact us and we will try to assist you. Please note, we do not charge for elective placements and do not have the ability to provide accommodation for elective students.