Postgraduate Medical Education Centres in Northern Ireland.

PROFESSIONAL training, with its ever-spreading ripples from undergraduate to postgraduate to continuing education of family doctors and consultants, has come to be recognised as the essential core of good medicine. Sir George Godber, who retired at the end of November 1973 from his appointment as Chief Medical Officer of the Department of Health and Social Security, has stated that the postgraduate medical education development in regional hospitals in England and Wales has been the most significant advance in medical practice over the past two decades. The hospital and general practitioner commitment to the public and optimal postgraduate education and training are completely interdependent and cannot be considered in isolation. The accreditation of posts considered as suitalble for general professional training for three years following the mandatory preregistration year and for vocational professional training for the succeeding four years emanating from appropriate professional bodies amended where necessary to the local scene reflects the current trend in the interdependence between postgraduate medical education and training and the Health Service commitments to the public. Adequate library facilities are a pre-requisite of a Postgraduate Medical Education Centre. There are lilbraries at the Postgraduate Medical Education Centres at Altnagelvin, Ballymena and Craigavon. These libraries were estajblished by means of a grant of £15,000 payable over a period of five years, received by one of us (J.H.B.) from the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust. The last part of this grant was paid in Septemiber 1972. The library for the Belfast Postgraduate Medical Education Centre has been amalgamated with the adjacent library at the Medical Biology Centre of Queen's University. In future, these Postgraduate Medical Education Centre libraries will be funded by the Department of Health and Social Services (N.I.) and the development and administration will be undertaken by the Medical Library at the Institute of Clinical Science of Queen's University of Belfast. The libraries contain current text books, a selection of British and foreign professional journals and provide a photostat copy service. The annual expenditure on text books and journals in each of the Postgraduate Medical Education Centres is approximately £1,000 per annum. Because of limited accommodation, at present it is necessary to restrict the library facilities to medical and dental graduates. Hospital medical staff and general practitioners take full advantage of this valuable