A plaque measuring 7″ × 6″ approximately and showing the College Coat of Arms in four colours raised on a wooden shield of light oak, is now available. The price is £5.50 if bought at the College; £6.00 by post for U.K. and £6.50 for overseas surface mail, including postage and packing.

Occasionally consultants are asked by their nursing colleagues to support an application to attend a Joint Board course. More often than not the response is to throw up one's hands in horror and say ‘Not another management course. Don't nurses do any nursing these days?’ I believe that if doctors knew a little more about the Joint Board and its courses they would press more vigorously for secondment of nurses for this purpose; it must be noted that the numbers of psychiatric nurses who attend is abysmally low. There are relatively few courses available throughout the country, and Areas seem unwilling to accept responsibility for putting on such training programmes. Even those which are available do not always receive adequate support, largely, no doubt, because so many psychiatric hospitals are understaffed and cannot spare nurses to attend.

The Court of Electors has recently reviewed experience of visiting hospitals that are seeking approval of their training schemes for the Membership examination. Some ideas have crystallized about the features that are considered desirable and that should therefore be looked for. The scheme described below is an ideal one and unlikely to be fully realized in many centres at present; but it may be of interest to colleagues whose hospitals are being visited to know the sorts of things the visiting panel will be bearing in mind. These criteria are a modification of draft guidelines developed by Dr Marshall Annear.

The COHSE Special Working Party Report was a response to guidance issued by the Department of Health and Social Security in HC(76)11 entitled The Management of Violent or Potentially Violent Hospital Patients, which the Confederation considered inadequate. The DHSS Circular had been prepared after protracted discussions with the Royal College of Nursing (Rcn) and the Royal College of Psychiatrists. The COHSE Report extends beyond the issue of the management of violence, and we did not consider all the points put forward in the document (see page 124, para. 2 and page 125, para. 5 below).

‘In fact I do not believe I have ever done so, not even when a patient came to see me in H … Street with his solicitor. He wanted to sue me for wrongful certification, but when I asked him if he was still Jesus Christ and he assured me that he was, his solicitor quietly took him away.’

A course on Research Methodology and Statistics sponsored jointly by the Research Committee and the Department of Postgraduate Studies, Manchester University, was held in the Department of Psychiatry, University Hospital of South Manchester on 5/6 and 26/27 November 1977.

Earlier analyses (Hassall and Trethowan, 1974, 1976) have examined the pass rates in the Preliminary Test and Membership Examinations in relation to the characteristics of the candidates and after separating those sitting for the first time and those re-sitting. This paper explores the relationship between performance in the Multiple Choice Questionnaire (MCQ) and performance in the examination as a whole, though without distinguishing between candidates making first and those making later attempts.

Annual and Quarterly Meetings of the College will be on the following dates in 1979. Please note that the date of the Annual Meeting given in the list published in the November 1977 Bulletin (p 10) has been changed.

In this paper I have outlined a model for the role of a Consultant Psychiatrist who is appointed for the purpose of providing ‘staff support’ in a Residential Caring Establishment. Some of the issues that arise are stated and discussed. The use of the model I propose leads to some recurrent, identifiable psychosocial phenomena which warrant further study and discussion.

If the perpetuation of a myth leads to the saving of central Government funds, political parties and bureaucrats will eschew reality.

This document, produced by the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Section of the College, is aimed at administrators, trainees considering entering the specialty, and colleagues in other disciplines. Its purpose is to describe the role of child and adolescent psychiatrists today, who work largely as part of a multidisciplinary team and may be based in a hospital or in the community. There is increasing emphasis on community work: assessment, treatment and preventive work is carried out with children and their families in close liaison with mainly non-medical colleagues. Such multidisciplinary teamwork has many advantages, but presents delicate problems in ethics and organization. In what follows ‘child psychiatrist’ will be generally used to mean ‘child and adolescent psychiatrist’.