Undergraduate ear, nose and throat training: How do we inspire the next generation? Response to author

Abstract

Sir,Thank you for your letter reminding readers about limited ENT undergraduate experience and the importance of promoting the specialty to future generations of surgeons. 1 SFO UK is already addressing all of the issues that you have raised. An undergraduate ENT curriculum has already been published 2 ; however, unfortunately this curriculum can only be recommended and not imposed onto individual medical schools. In view of this, the SFO group has written an "E-book" over the last 2 years that should be available to all medical students as a Kindle Book by the end of this year. The content has been mapped onto the published curriculum and is essentially "all you need to know about ENT as an undergraduate". The importance of engaging with local surgical societies is well recognised. SFO UK has already forged links with the recently formed Royal College Surgeons of England Future Surgical Forum's group comprising of all surgical medical school societies. We have also seen a number of new ENT societies flourish in medical schools over recent years.During 2017, SFO UK has supported over 10 national or regional careers fairs in addition to multiple local careers events/teaching sessions organised by regional SFO representatives. We have produced an "advice pack" which is available on our website to support medical students to organise local events such as careers days or teaching sessions along with the help of the local ENT undergraduate consultant lead.The SFO annual conference continues to go "strength to strength". At the SFO day at BACO 2018, we had 151 registrations and over 100 abstracts. We are also planning collaboration with the Association of Otolaryngologists in Training (AOT) group to organise a pre-conference ENT day at the 2019 Association of Surgeons in Training (ASIT) conference in addition to the annual SFO UK conference.It is very difficult to measure whether all these efforts will indeed achieve one of our intended goals of attracting the next generation of ENT surgeons. However, it is important that we are not too pessimistic as we always see young, dynamic and ambitious students and junior doctors at these events who overwhelming give positive feedback after seeing what ENT has to offer. CONFLI CT OF INTERESTChairman of SFO UK. O R C I D Jayesh Doshi