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The Future of the Membership

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

Sydney Brandon*
Affiliation:
University of Leicester
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The question has been posed—is an examination necessary to admit to the membership of the Royal College of Psychiatrists? The College represents the views of psychiatrists, maintains the standards of the profession, regulates and monitors practise and accepts a broad overall responsibility for education. It should admit to its membership those who practice as psychiatrists. Who then are the psychiatrists? Should the membership be open to anyone who makes such a claim or should it be linked with appointment to specific jobs as a psychiatrist at a level yet to be determined? What of private practitioners, interested GPs? Surely anyone who wants to be a psychiatrist, to paraphrase Sam Goldwyn, ought to have his head examined by his peers to establish that his claim to be a psychiatrist is acceptable. It is the College which should regulate entry into the profession of psychiatry, not the National Health Service, an employing authority, or even the universities. Some membership entrance conditions are needed which lay down minimum requirements for becoming a psychiatrist and it is important to exclude or reject, in my view, before higher psychiatric training commences.

Type
Training of Psychiatrists: Prospects and Alternatives
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC-BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1981

References

Harden, R. M. & Gleeson, F. A. (1979) Assessment of clinical competence using an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE). Medical Education Booklet, No. 8. Association for the Study of Medical Education.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Hassall, C. & Trethowan, W. H. (1978) Multiple choice examinations: Their predictive value in the Preliminiary Test and the Membership Examination. Bulletin, June, pp 101103.Google Scholar
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