The National Health Service (Vocational Training for General Medical Practice) Regulations 1997

Prescribed medical experience

6.—(1) Subject to regulation 12(9), the medical experience prescribed for the purposes of section 31(2)(a) of the Act is the satisfactory completion of a period or periods of training amounting to at least three years employment, and meeting the other requirements of this regulation.

(2) The reference in paragraph (1) to three years employment, and the references in paragraphs (3) and (4) to other periods of employment, are to periods of whole-time employment; but, subject to paragraph (8), the requirements of this regulation may be satisfied by periods of part-time employment of equivalent duration.

(3) The training shall include a period or periods amounting to at least 12 months employment as a General Practice (GP) Registrar with a practitioner who falls within regulation 7(1).

(4) The remainder of the training—

(a) shall be spent as a practitioner in posts falling within regulation 8; and

(b) shall include a period or periods amounting to not less than 6 months nor more than 12 months employment in each of two specialties mentioned in different paragraphs below—

(i) General Medicine;

(ii) Geriatric Medicine;

(iii) Paediatrics;

(iv) Psychiatry;

(v) One of—

• Accident and Emergency Medicine; or

• General Surgery; or

• Accident and Emergency Medicine together with either General Surgery or Orthopaedic Surgery;

(vi) One of—

• Obstetrics; or

• Gynaecology; or

• Obstetrics and Gynaecology.

(5) Where training is spent in employment in specialties which are not mentioned in sub-paragraph (b) of paragraph (4), not more than six months employment in any one such specialty may be taken into account in calculating, for the purposes of paragraph (1), the period or periods of training undertaken.

(6) The Joint Committee shall supervise the training and shall in particular secure that it complies with the requirements of article 31(1) of the Medical Directive, or (in the case of part-time training) article 31(1) as appropriately modified together with article 34 (the text of articles 30, 31(1) and 34 as they had effect on the date these Regulations were made is reproduced in Schedule 1).

(7) The prescribed experience must be acquired within the period of seven years ending on the day on which a person makes an application for a certificate of prescribed experience under regulation 10.

(8) In relation to periods of part-time employment—

(a) in computing any period of training which began on or before 31st December 1994 there shall be disregarded any period of part-time employment during which the duties of the person employed occupied less than half of the time usually occupied by the duties of persons employed whole-time in similar employment; and

(b) in computing any period of training which began after 31st December 1994 there shall be disregarded any period of part-time employment during which the duties of the person employed, taken week by week, occupied less than 60 per cent of the time usually occupied by the duties of persons employed whole-time in similar employment;

and in relation to any period of training which began after 31st December 1994 employment which is not whole-time shall not be regarded as equivalent to whole-time employment unless it includes at least two periods of whole-time employment, each lasting not less than one week, one such period falling within paragraph (3) and one within paragraph (4).

(9) For the purposes of this regulation, a “month” includes a period which begins on the first Wednesday of the month (whether or not that is the first day of the month) and ends on the last day of the month.