Paediatric Cardiology
Pending completion of this section of the website we have incorporated some specialty information for you from the JRCPTB site (www.jrcptb.org.uk), as follows:-
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.