The little differences — sports medicine training in the UK

Dawn Thompson, our Junior Assoc Editor from BASEM, on a UK NICU floor!!!

Our Junior Associate editor from the British Association for Sport and Exercise Medicine (BASEM)— Dawn Thompson–joins us today with her newest contribution to the CJSM blog. As many of our regular readers know, Dr. Thompson is a sport and exercise medicine (SEM) trainee in the UK and has contributed frequently to these blog pages.

Her blog post today takes up the subject of how different SEM training can be in different sites around the world.  In the USA, where I practice, one gets their primary training in a specialty such as family medicine, emergency medicine, internal medicine, pediatrics, or physical medicine & rehabilitation; only then does one pursue one to two years of further specialty training in sports medicine.  New Zealand and Australia follow a very different path, as explained by the Australasian College of Sport and Exercise Physicians (ACSEP) in their website.

The UK does it their own way, and Dr. Thompson (DT) is here to tell us what that is like as she spends time on the ‘sidelines’ of the…..neonatal intensive care unit!???

_______________________________________________

DT: It’s been a busy year and a while since my last post. Once again it’s a crazy time of the morning (4am) and I’m in the midst of an unusually quiet 12.5 hour shift on the neonatal intensive care unit wondering how exactly this is going to make me a better sports physician! I’m not sure I have found the answer to that one yet but it has inspired me to think about the current state of SEM training.

Over the last 10-20 years sports and exercise medicine as its own specialty around the world has come on leaps and bounds. The UK Faculty for Sports and Exercise Medicine (FSEM) was set up in 2005 and is the governing body for SEM overseeing the training curriculum in the UK. The system in the UK is quite different to many other parts of Europe and the pathway seems to vary greatly between country and even between different states. Read more of this post