If medical students are to be effective in clinical practice they must acquire the skills needed to put patients with psychiatric problems at ease, to promote trust and confidence, and to elicit an accurate and relevant history. Unfortunately, there is considerable evidence that traditional methods of medical training fail to equip them with these essential skills.

Medical audit is currently the subject of much discussion, but the breadth and intensity of the debate should not obscure the idea of medical audit as ‘basically a process of self-education’ (Shaw, 1980a). The requirements for audit have been summarized as information, resources and willingness to participate (Shaw, 1980b). I have attempted to devise a simple scheme for self-audit in a general psychiatric setting. The acquisition of appropriate information within the resources of ordinary clinical practice was my aim.

The term Culture Shock describes the complex gamut of feelings experienced following an abrupt change of environment, as when an individual moves country. This event causes a discontinuity of social relationships previously relied on for the maintenance of self-esteem and frequently taken entirely for granted.

At the Annual Meeting of the College in July 1979 the Social and Community Psychiatry Group was constituted a Specialist Section.

An assumption underlying this paper is that knowledge of psychotherapy should be available to all psychiatry trainees, not just to those with a special interest in psychotherapy. It does not, of course, follow that all trainees should practise psychotherapy throughout their careers, but they should know something about the therapeutic aspects of the doctor-patient relationship. These aspects are highlighted in psychotherapy but are by no means exclusive to it. Given this assumption, we are faced with the problem of how to provide this training—in terms of content and logistics.

The contributions to the BMJ on multidisciplinary teams, the editorial and subsequent correspondence have raised and ventilated, sometimes with heat and sometimes inaccurately, many different issues and points of view concerning the ways in which different professional persons work (or don't work) together.

Little information is available about how long patients stay in the Special Hospitals. This paper describes what is believed to be the first systematic study of this topic.

Should the future GP do a six months' senior house officer job in psychiatry as part of his or her training? This was the central question at a one-day discussion held on 28 May 1980 at the Royal College of General Practitioners in Princes Gate, London, following the publication of the guidelines prepared by a RCPsych/RCGP Liaison Committee (Bulletin, June 1980, p 93) and presented to the conference by Dr Thomas Bewley. As Professor N. Kessel, among others, pointed out, psychiatric hospitals and units stand to gain considerably if they can recruit these doctors to their junior staff. Regular SHO posts are often difficult to fill at present, and GP trainees may be of very good quality. They do not expect to compete up the specialty training ladder, but they will carry part of the work-load. On the other hand, is what the hospital offers what they really need, or can it be made so?