Addressing the 'python' crisis affecting medical specialist training programmes: organisational frameworks and...

Medical education programmes constantly need to balance numerous and often competing demands of their stakeholders (i.e. trainees, educators, hospital administration, specialist colleges and accrediting bodies). Many of these issues are difficult to resolve; such challenges actually represent a special type of crisis - known as a 'python' crisis in scholarly organisational management literature. Basic physician training programmes are particularly susceptible to 'python'-like crises. These specialist vocational training programmes rely on the goodwill of experienced clinicians, who provide teaching and supervision to trainees on a voluntary basis and whose engagement in teaching activities is often limited because of other work and personal commitments. On top of this, expectations from important internal and external stakeholders collectively act as additional constraints, similar to the constricting coils of a python. Many of these issues remain unresolved over years and are likely to grow over time. Utilising the 'python' metaphor as an analogy, this review integrates interdisciplinary insights from the fields of educational leadership, organisational crisis management, developmental psychology, strategic finance and the natural sciences to offer a framework ('SCALE') that simultaneously aims to improve a training programme's resilience to short-term shocks while fostering long-term sustainability. This proposed framework may prove useful not only for hospital-based training programmes in internal medicine but also education programmes at all levels of medical training.