Educational Organizations: The Scottish Council for Postgraduate Medical Education

It has never been true to say-and how much less is it true today-that once a doctor has passed his final examinations and is entering practice his education has been completed. William Osler wrote at the beginning of this century (Osler 1900): "More clearly than any other, the physician should illustrate the truth of Plato's saying that education is a life-long process. The training at medical school gives a man his direction, points him the way, and furnishes him a chart, fairly incomplete for the voyage, but nothing more." There is a great variation in the way individual doctors continue to learn after completing a formal undergraduate course. Once established in a particular field of practice, they learn from their own experience, from colleagues with whom they work, from attending seminars and lectures, from reading, and from membership of medical clubs and societies; but it is in the interval between graduation and full establishment in practice that the need for training varies most noticeably from one specialty to another.