The future of postgraduate training

Improvements to postgraduate training have included newly designed postgraduate curricula, new forms of delivery of learning, more valid and reliable assessments, and more rigorous evaluation of training programmes. All these changes have been necessary and have now started to settle in. Now therefore is an appropriate time to look to the future of postgraduate training. Predicting the future is difficult in any course of life-however an examination of recent trends is often a good place to start. In this regard the recent trend to start to produce more doctors and healthcare professionals of the type that the population needs is likely to continue for some time to come. Medical education will also need to be more flexible in the future. The more flexible that training programmes are, the more likely that we will have experts that are sufficiently flexible to meet a range of different challenges throughout the rest of their careers. Medical education will also become more seamless in the future (at present there are probably too many major milestones and transitions in medical education). In the future educators will make much more use of technology enhanced learning, e-learning and simulation in postgraduate medical education. There will also be more pressure on postgraduate training programmes to offer value for money and to be able to demonstrate such value for money. Postgraduate medical education of the future will also be a more personalised and adaptive experience. It will be far more based on learners' individual needs and will be more responsive to those needs. Lastly postgraduate education will be much more closely supervised than it has been in the past. A common theme running through these changes will be patient centredness. This will mean safer training programmes that produce the type of doctors that patients and populations need.