The dual training is five years in length and on satisfactory completion will lead to the award of two Certificates of Completion of Training (CCT) in Medical Psychotherapy and General Psychiatry, recognised by the General Medical Council if the trainee is appointed to the two dual training sub-specialties at national recruitment simultaneously.

The Training Programme Director in the Eastern Deanery for the Medical Psychotherapy Scheme is Dr William Burbridge-James and the Training Programme Director for the General Psychiatry Scheme is Dr Albert Michael, delegated in South Essex to Dr Abu Abraham.  The two Training Programme Directors take joint responsibility for the running of the dual training scheme as a whole and will both assess progress as part of the Annual Record of Competence Progression (ARCP) each year.  Each year there will be a six monthly review ahead of the ARCP to assess the trainee’s progress and fulfilment of their training plan. 

The dual trainee will at all times be allocated an educational supervisor (trainer) who is a trained Consultant Medical Psychotherapist and an educational supervisor (trainer) who is a Consultant General Psychiatrist.

There are three strands to the training programme over the five years.

One strand is a full higher training in General Psychiatry, the second strand is a full higher training in Medical Psychotherapy and the third strand is in integrating these two sub-specialty trainings in the applications of psychotherapy in different psychiatric settings.

The underlying principle of exposing the trainee to both General Psychiatry and Medical Psychotherapy from the outset of training concurrently is to foster a ‘training dialogue’ for both trainee and trainers between the two sub-specialties and their different paradigms of mind.

In the first two years of this sequential model of Dual Specialty Training (ST4 and ST5) the trainee will rotate through two General Adult Psychiatry posts in the South Essex Scheme higher training scheme.  During this time the special interest/research sessions alongside the academic programme will provide clinical and theoretical exposure of the psychotherapy component of the training. In the third and fourth years (ST6 and ST7) the trainee will be in the Psychotherapy post based in Southend and Basildon, South Essex, with the special interest session alongside on-call commitments maintaining the links to general adult psychiatry.  The final fifth year of dual training (ST8) focuses on building on the integration of the two sub-specialities of Psychotherapy and General Psychiatry in line with the trainee’s career aspirations and training needs.

Less than full time training (LTFT) is possible with dual training.