Clin Med
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Medical specialty training is changing which will result in shorter, more focused training programmes. Senior house officer posts will disappear from August 2007, and be replaced by training posts and trust grade doctors. ⋯ Curricula development and delivery with quality assurance is now the responsibility of a new training board--the Postgraduate Medical Education and Training Board (PMETB). There is an opportunity to create a new specialty of acute medicine to help meet the crisis of care for acutely ill patients in our hospitals.
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The effect on health of urbanisation is two-edged. On the one hand, there are the benefits of ready access to healthcare, sanitation, and secure nutrition, whilst on the other there are the evils of overcrowding, pollution, social deprivation, crime, and stress-related illness. ⋯ Here we review some of the health-related aspects of urbanisation, and comment on strategies designed to improve urban health. Because there is such a clear divide between the long process of urbanisation in industrialised western nations and the relatively recent explosive expansion in resource-poor countries, they are discussed separately.