In giving a brief account of salient events in my professional life I will start in 1937 when I was aged 30 and had just completed my formal training as a child psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. Apart from a medical background and an interest in psychology, my choice of career had been determined by what I had seen and heard during the six months that I had spent in a school for disturbed children between my preclinical training at Cambridge, where I had also read natural sciences and psychology, and completing my medical qualification at University College Hospital. During my time at the school I had worked with children and adolescents whose difficulties I know now to be typical of much personality disorder, and had been exposed to hypotheses, derived from the ‘new psychology’ emanating from Vienna, regarding the role of childhood experience in their origin. Accordingly I had decided to train as a psychoanalyst. This I began before qualifying medically and continued whilst spending eighteen months at the Maudsley, learning the psychiatry of adults as one of Aubrey Lewis's early students. This proved a productive relationship, not least because on many questions we agreed to differ.

If Child Psychiatric Services are to survive into the 1980s, we believe that practitioners will have no alternative but to make sense of the complicated administrative network on which their future depends. This is an account of one such attempt by three Child and Family Psychiatric teams working in a Health Authority Area.

Few postgraduate medical examinations have attracted so much comment and criticism as the MRCPsych. The main participants in the debate have been the College and its various training sub-committees, and APIT which has always been opposed to the MRCPsych examination in principle (Bulletin, April 1979). In a recent Newsletter (March, 1980) APIT stated that only 5 out of 90 trainees in their 1979 survey felt that passing the MRCPsych examination proved that one is a competent psychiatrist. It felt that the examination had ‘crystallized’, with no fundamental changes despite a number of Examination Forums held by the College. Radical changes in order to improve the examination were therefore advocated.

The MRCPsych is now firmly established as the normal requirement for a career in psychiatry in this country. The need for other medical specialists to acquire psychiatric knowledge and skills raises the question of a possible demand for a second type of College examination. The Court of Electors have been considering some of the arguments for and against a College Diploma and would welcome further discussion in the College on this.