Palliative Medicine sites
Hospitals on the Wessex Palliative Medicine rotation include:
Training includes gaining experience in Palliative Medicine working across all settings including outpatients, in patient’s own homes, within hospices and in an acute hospital setting. Depending on the site this may be delivered in blocks or a post may involve exposure to HPCT, CPCT and inpatient work all at once.
The training programme rotates to five different centres:
- Basingstoke
- Currently 1 post based at St Michael’s Hospice, Basingstoke (Independent hospice) and/or Basingstoke and North Hampshire Hospital
- Opportunities to experience care of Pseudomyxoma peritonei
- Bournemouth/Christchurch
- Currently 2 posts based at The Macmillan Unit, Christchurch (NHS hospice) and/or The Royal Bournemouth Hospital
- Portsmouth
- Currently 2 posts based at The Rowans Hospice, Waterlooville (Independent hospice)
- Salisbury
- Currently 1 post based at Salisbury Hospice (NHS hospice on acute hospital site)
- Opportunities to gain experience within the specialist spinal service
- Southampton
- Currently 4 posts based at Mountbatten Hospice Hampshire, West End (Independent Hospice) and/or Southampton General Hospital
- Diverse opportunities to gain experience in a tertiary cancer and haematology centre, intensive and specialist high care environments, cystic fibrosis service, TYA unit (with links to Jack’s Place Teenage and Young Adult Hospice)
Posts are for one year, rotating in August. Resident doctors will have the opportunity to rotate to at least three, and possibly up to all five centres.
Although preferences for posts are taken into account, once training needs and previous posts are taken into consideration, there is often very little flexibility as to where you are placed. Provided you live centrally in the patch, then all sites are reachable within a 50 minute commute. We strongly recommend that you do so, to ensure the commute is manageable throughout your training but also in view of on-call requirements.
On call requirements
All training sites involve an out-of-hours/on-call component. The frequency of this varies from unit to unit but is usually between 1:5 and 1:7 nights/weekends. Less than full time trainees will undertake a pro-rata share of out-of-hours and on-call duties.
On-call duties are non-resident with an expectation of on-site hospice inpatient work at weekends. You need to be within a maximum 1 hour driving distance for on-call purposes. The hospices do not have on-call rooms. However there are arrangements for areas where a break can be taken if you are called in overnight and are too tired to drive home.
General Internal Medicine
Since 2022 Palliative Medicine has been dual accrediting with General Internal Medicine, meaning that one year out of the four years of specialist training will be spent in General Medicine.
- ST4 year: usually spent primarily in Palliative Medicine. Maintaining Medical Competency days to be arranged during this year (often one day/month or 2 x week long blocks) Sometimes a GIM block will be arranged for your ST4 year (and either your ST5 or ST6 year be pure Palliative Medicine instead)
- ST5-ST7 years: comprise of 8 months in Palliative Medicine and a 4 month GIM block. In addition MMC days to be arranged.
- Study leave can be used to attend the Wessex GIM training days (at current time – 8 a year)
The location where GIM blocks are based is constantly growing and changing to meet needs. As of August 2026 we expect that GIM delivery will be in the following locations (subject to change):
- Royal Bournemouth Hospital (1 x Respiratory and 1 x Geriatric Medicine posts)
- Basingstoke Hospital (1 x Respiratory Medicine)
- Southampton General Hospital (Up to 3 x Acute Medicine)
- Salisbury Hospital (1 x TBC)