LIBRO + ANEXOS CARDIOLOGÍA

Libro Blanco de las ACES Pediátricas 2024 48 ❚ Page 6 of 64 Paediatric Cardiology curriculum The scope of Paediatric Cardiology requires diagnostic reasoning and the ability to manage uncertainty, deal with comorbidities and recognise when specialty opinion or care is required both from colleagues within specialty and from other specialties. Paediatric Cardiologists need the ability to work within, or as leaders of, teams and systems involving other healthcare professionals to effectively provide optimal patient care. Paediatric Cardiologists generally work primarily as hospital-based specialists and need to integrate their work with not only community based colleagues, but with a huge multidisciplinary team of health care professionals. These include nursing staff, cardiac physiologists, radiographers, physiotherapists, dentists, psychologists, dieticians, speech and language therapists, occupational therapists, play specialists and many others. Demonstration of involvement with multidisciplinary and multi-professional working throughout training will be required. Paediatric Cardiologists will have training across all Paediatric Cardiology capabilities in practice (CiPs) and as such will have flexibility to work in all areas of acute Congenital and Paediatric cardiology as well as specialists in for example imaging or advanced intervention. We would not expect Paediatric Cardiologists to participate in either the acute medical or indeed the general paediatric take. Paediatric Cardiologists have a variety of opportunities for clinical research and quality improvement projects. Increasing opportunities for more formal academic training routes are developing. Most Paediatric Cardiologists will develop advanced knowledge and skills in a least one area of more specialised service need. This may include independent operator procedural skills, such that they can undertake percutaneous interventions, cardiac pacing or electrophysiology. However, it may also involve the acquisition of advanced imaging skills for example for fetal diagnosis and counselling, complex diagnostic and functional echocardiography or cross-sectional modalities such as CT and MRI. Other areas will involve advanced knowledge skills in therapeutic areas such as intensive care, inherited cardiac conditions, heart failure, transplantation or pulmonary arterial hypertension. Some individuals will particularly choose to focus on adult congenital cardiology and transition care. Other new areas of expertise continue to develop with the evolution of this speciality. Thus, there will be an important progression point where trainees, with their trainers and Programme Directors, select appropriate areas of advanced modular training. Given the nature of this speciality, in which the rarer conditions occur at a relatively low volume, it is also important that their exposure to the general milieu of congenital and paediatric cardiac conditions throughout the indicative five years of specialty training. The numbers of trainees undertaking each advanced module have been developed historically but have matched service need based on monitoring output and consultant post advertisements. Importantly, this use of modules ensures CCT holders will be using the capabilities they have trained in without training in unnecessary capabilities. It should be noted that over the last 5 years of congenital cardiology consultant appointments, only 2 have been advertised as ‘generalist’ or ‘ward’ consultants, without an indication of a need for an individual specialist interest. There has also been no situation in the last several years where a new CCT holder has been