Foundation Programme

The Foundation Programme aims to:

• Build on undergraduate education by imbuing recently graduated doctors with the attributes of professionalism, and the primacy of patient welfare which are required to provide for safe and effective practice and the care of patients with acute and long term conditions
• Provide deliberately generic training that ensures that foundation doctors develop and demonstrate a range of essential clinical skills that are required of all doctors regardless of specialty
• Provide the opportunity to begin to develop leadership, team working and supervisory skills in order to deliver care in the setting of a contemporary multidisciplinary team and to begin to make independent clinical decisions with appropriate supervision
• Provide opportunities for foundation doctors to experience a variety of career options in order to inform career choice and ensure that whatever career path is subsequently entered, all trainees have experienced the provision of medical care in both hospital and community settings.

Outcomes of Foundation Training

Foundation Year 1 enables medical graduates to begin to take supervised responsibility for patient care and consolidate the skills that they have learned at medical school.  Satisfactory completion of F1 allows the relevant university, or their designated representative in a postgraduate deanery or foundation school, to recommend to the GMC that the foundation doctor be granted full registration.

Foundation Year 2 doctors remain under clinical supervision (as do all doctors in training) but take on increasing responsibility for patient care. In particular they begin to make management decisions as part of their progress towards independent practice. F2 doctors further develop their core generic skills and contribute more to the education and training of allied healthcare professionals, medical students and less experienced doctors. At the end of F2 they will have begun to demonstrate clinical effectiveness, leadership and the decision making responsibilities that are essential for hospital and General Practice specialty training. Satisfactory completion of F2 will lead to the award of a Foundation Achievement of Competence Document (FACD) which indicates that the foundation doctor is ready to enter a core, specialty or general practice training programme.