Supporting people who have eating and drinking difficulties.

Eating and drinking are essential for maintenance of nutrition and hydration, but are also important for pleasure and social interactions. The ability to eat and drink hinges on a complex and coordinated system, resulting in significant potential for things to go wrong.The Royal College of Physicians (RCP) has published updated guidance on how to support people who have eating and drinking difficulties, particularly towards the end of life.Decisions about nutrition and hydration and when to start, continue or stop treatment are some of the most challenging to make in medical practice. The newly updated guidance aims to support healthcare professionals to work together with patients, their families and carers to make decisions around nutrition and hydration that are in the best interests of the patient. It covers the factors affecting our ability to eat and drink, strategies to support oral nutrition and hydration, techniques of clinically-assisted nutrition and hydration, and the legal and ethical framework to guide decisions about giving and withholding treatment, emphasising the two key concepts of capacity and best interests.This article aims to provide an executive summary of the guidance.

Trials and tribulations of the annual review of competence progression - lessons learned from core medical training in London.

The annual review of competence progression (ARCP) was introduced as a way of keeping records and reviewing satisfactory progress through a medical curriculum for doctors in training. It provides public assurance that doctors are trained to a satisfactory standard and are fit for purpose. A routine external review of the core medical training (CMT) ARCPs in London revealed documentation of satisfactory progression of trainees to the next level of training without the evidence to support their completion of the curriculum. An internal review and series of process interventions were subsequently conducted and implemented to improve the quality and standardisation of the ARCPs. This paper reviews these interventions, discusses the lessons learned from the internal review and highlights issues applicable to any ARCP process.

Where did the acute medical trainees go? A review of the career pathways of acute care common stem acute medical trainees in London.

Acute care common stem acute medicine (ACCS AM) training was designed to develop competent multi-skilled acute physicians to manage patients with multimorbidity from 'door to discharge' in an era of increasing acute hospital admissions. Recent surveys by the Royal College of Physicians have suggested that acute medical specialties are proving less attractive to trainees. However, data on the career pathways taken by trainees completing core acute medical training has been lacking. Using London as a region with a 100% fill rate for its ACCS AM training programme, this study showed only 14% of trainees go on to higher specialty training in acute internal medicine and a further 10% to pursue higher medical specialty training with dual accreditation with internal medicine. 16% of trainees switched from ACCS AM to emergency medicine or anaesthetics during core ACCS training, and intensive care medicine proved to be the most popular career choice for ACCS AM trainees (21%). The ACCS AM training programme therefore does not appear to be providing what it was set out to do and this paper discusses the potential causes and effects.