Editor’s Choice: From the ground up

This week BMJ Careers looks at some of the building blocks supporting doctors’ work and careers, from academic research and ethics to ensuring equality of opportunity in careers.

Garth Funston and colleagues guide readers through the career path of a clinical academic (http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=20021103). As well as providing an insight into each stage of the path, they also deal with some of the misconceptions that doctors often hold about academic careers, such as the assumption that doctors will not be paid as well in academic posts and the belief that doctors will have to give up clinical practice to pursue an academic career.

Marika Davies looks at how doctors can explore an interest in ethics (http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=20021104). There is growing recognition of the need for clinicians to have formal ethics support when they make complex decisions, and as a result many NHS acute care trusts have set up clinical ethics committees. Davies describes the work of these groups and discusses what doctors need to do to join one.

The academic research informing treatment and the ethics underlying patient care are foundations of doctors’ work, but that work also relies on teams of colleagues. Increasingly, the optimal working of those teams will depend on the drive to ensure equality of opportunity for all doctors, regardless of their working patterns.

Outlining progress on supporting doctors with different working patterns, Jean Yong and her coauthors trace the history of female doctors’ working part time, from its origins in “the part-time training scheme for married women doctors” (http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=20021082). They also present a new look at the effect of part time working on the medical workforce through the results of a survey of those who have trained part time in paediatrics, and they challenge some ideas about the impact of part time training and working.