Purpose and Links

When I went through the national recruitment process a few years ago, I couldn't easily find comparable information between the schools of ophthalmology and their training programmes. At that time, the eyedocs website was helpful, with some reviews and links, but it wasn't too objective. (But see update below). I wanted to find out how the rotations worked, what I'd get paid, whether the training was quality, what the workload was like, how much cataract surgery I'd be doing and when? My other half wanted to know how much I'd be commuting and how much houses costed at the various places. We wanted to see how far away the places were from family, the sea and the hills...

After spending hours researching these details, I thought it is a waste of time if we were all doing the same things. Seeing how many people were using this site in the first year, I've updated it each year since with the most recent GMC national training survey results, links to the deanery websites and eyedocs reviews, maps of the rotations, and house price cost.

I want to have comprehensive descriptions of what a typical rotation through 7 years looks like for each deanery, but I have not managed to achieve it yet. If you notice this info is missing from you deanery page, I'd be grateful for a message with the info.

Of course, some people will say, 'just give me a training post and I'll be happy'. Good for them. But I suspect that most people will care about where they train for personal and professional reasons. Most will care what their work life balance will be like. Most will care what their job prospects are like at the end of training. The deaneries are not made equally! If that is you, I hope this website has helped.

Finally, when you attend the interview and give feedback, please mention how better, more comparable info is needed from the college! 

*** 2019 Update ***
The Royal College have listened to feedback and tried to improve the quality of the information available to candidates. They now have a proforma that each location need to fill in each year. Some of those documents have more information than my site so take a look.
The eyedocs website has really improved the quality of it's info and is far sexier than my website - have a good explore there as well.