Description
A very warm welcome to this new CPD journal which it is intended will be mailed three times a year to all doctors in the UK specialising in Old Age Psychiatry.
When initially asked if I would take on the Editors role, I had a number of concerns. How would I cope with launching this journal in the same year as starting my first substantive consultant post, with a population of 23,000 of over 65s and one SHO as medical support? Being deluged with journals myself which I feel obliged to browse through, was I really doing a service to colleagues under similar pressures by producing yet more? Was there room for another CPD journal now that the College’s Advances in Psychiatric Treatment was up and running? Why not leave it to the Old Age Psychiatrist, the in-house newsletter of the Faculty of Old Age Psychiatrists to increase its CDP element?
What persuaded me to get involved was seeing the quality of sister publications in the CPD/CME range and imagining this in our own specialty. I was already a fan of CPD and the concept of lifelong learning, and a career Old Age Psychiatrist for some years. Here was the chance to produce a journal solely for Old Age Psychiatry free to all doctors who care about the specialty. It provided the opportunity to commission reviews from experts, attract original service-oriented research papers, keep updated on advances in medical care of elderly people, provide a forum for trainees to publish short articles of personal interest, assist in developing skills in evidence based medicine and information seeking via the internet, and present abstracts of relevance from the wider literature.
Old Age Psychiatrists are by nature good team workers, and are used to acting together as advocates to improve service provision for the people we serve. If you have an innovative service that works well; if you have come across an interesting clinical case which illustrates an useful teaching point; if you are the national expert on a subject; or if you have come across articles that you have found particularly helpful, then please share this information with your colleagues through this Bulletin.
Readers’ views would be welcomed on the material appearing in this first issue of ‘CPD Bulletin Psychiatry’. At present, the style of CPD activity in this Bulletin would be categorised under Module “D” of the Royal College of Psychiatrists CPD programme. The full educational loop of reading and the assessment would seem to equate to 4 CPD units (see page 27). It is hoped that this will be a useful and stimulating addition to the material already available.
I am indebted to my editorial board members for their continuing support, and hope that you find as much of interest in this first edition as I have in helping prepare it.
Andy Barker
Editor
