A pilot study of community-based training of hospital obstetric senior house officers

Most senior house officer (SHOs) posts have little relevance to general practice. This problem was addressed in a pilot community teaching placement, of up to one session per week over four to six months that was set up to learn community-based obstetrics from primary health care teams. The nine participating SHOs were interviewed; qualitative analysis revealed seven themes that were important to the SHOs that should help guide further community-based teaching. Such sessional release for improving the practice-based component of vocational training merits evaluation in a larger study.