Report from the ACO Conference, May 2007

A successful conference at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor, focusing on the use of humanities in teaching. Some resources will become available over the next few weeks at www.aco.org.uk.
Those of you who know Paddy McEvoy (who wrote “Educating the Future GP”) will be sorry to hear of his imminent retirement from GP education. The ACO, with Paddy’s blessing, are planning a significant bursary to fund educator time to produce a new edition of this book. Please contact admin@aco.org.uk for further details.
Trainers could join the ACO and therefore receive the Green Journal at a much lower price. The ACO membership numbers are reduced, though this is in part related to a 10% drop in the number of course organisers employed in the UK in the last 2 years. This has been particularly focussed on one or two Deaneries who have made redundancies.
The Da Vinci programme provides grants to allow vocational exchanges to the EU. More details at http://www.ets-lichfield.com/english/index.html

The curriculum and the nMRCGP
Many COs had not seen the e-portfolio and were not clear how this fitted into the WBPA and the training throughout the 3 years. Some schemes have moved to a final 12 months in GP and some Deaneries are not yet able to provide 18 months in GP. A few schemes were planning to use COs as educational supervisors, but trainers were to be targeted as educational supervisors in most areas. There was unanimity in the need to reimburse trainers appropriately for this extra work. Benchmarking and QA of the WBPA and the CSA is needed throughout the country, and although the RCGP are planning this, the consensus was that we needed to act on this issue locally and soon.

Increasing the ACO’s impact on national change
The ACO will explore closer links with NAPCE, the UKCEA and the putative national trainer group body (which is being proposed by the BMA), perhaps developing a joint representative body which may carry more political weight than the constituent organisations.

The ACO questionniare
The questionnaire, which were endorsed by the feelings of the ACO delegates at the conference, can be viewed at http://www.aco.org.uk/news/questionnaire_2007.htm

Future ACO conferences
The ACO Conference 2008 has been booked for Wednesday 4 – Friday 6 June at Madingley Hall, Cambridge. The 2009 conference is being run by the Northern Deanery.