During GDMO, how is the work/life balance seeing family/friends and where are you based when not on deployment?

Hi Harriet,

Glad you have found some of the posts useful so far!

When you are in the UK during GDMO time you will predominantly work in a military medical centre. Most people stay in the same med centre for the whole time, but people do occasionally move if they are either unhappy with the location, or their supervising GP moves to a different practice and their replacement GP is not trained as a GDMO supervisor.

During your phase 2 training you will be given a list of the available med centres and asked to submit a list of your preferences with reasons for those (for example, I listed bases near the south west as my partner was based in that area. While none of the jobs I listed were available, they looked at my reasons for them and picked another job that wasn't on the original jobs list, but was as close to the south west as they could manage). Sometimes they aren't able to be so accommodating, and people can end up being posted somewhere they didn't want to go to, but usually those type of postings will still be in the correct country (as opposed to a directed posting to Germany/Cyprus etc..)

My normal working pattern went something like:
Monday - 0800-1000 clinic. 1000-1030 coffee. 1030-1230 clinic. 1230-1330 Lunch. 1330-1630 Educational meeting with supervisor/joint clinic/some sort of educational activity.
Tuesday - Morning clinic and lunch as previous. 1330-1600 clinic. 1600-1630 admin.
Wednesday - Morning clinic and lunch as previous. 1330-1600 Practice meetings.
Thursday - Morning clinic and lunch as previous. Afternoon off to do sports (as we had practice meeting on a wednesday afternoon which is when everyone else gets time off to play sport). Sometimes I would do a clinic instead, depending on how many clinical sessions I still needed to pass my end of year review.
Friday - Morning clinic and lunch as previous. Afternoons varied, sometimes off, sometimes I was 'duty doc'. I tended to volunteer to stay on site if I had other work to do (like organise unit ski trips etc..).

The clinics were a mix of primary health care and occupational medicine, I did a lot of occ med because I liked it and because I worked in a small practice. Colleagues who didn't like it and worked in large practices tended to avoid occ med if they could.

I had loads of time off, far more than I could actually take, so getting time to go away for long weekends and see friends and family was always pretty straight forward.

There's a few things that might help some of the above make sense.
GDMOs keep a portfolio, similar to the one you do during FY1&2. This means GDMO is recognised as a 'training pathway' by the GMC, even though you're not actually training to be anything.. but it means things like our indemnity insurance is cheaper and applying for specialty training is more straight forward. In order to pass your end of year review/ARCP you need to do 150 clinical sessions. Some of these you will do abroad, but most you will do in the UK. Each clinical session is half a day of clinic. It doesn't sound like much, but once you take in to account all your other commitments (exercises/deployments/time teaching at a medical regiment/going on AT/playing sport) it can sometimes be tricky to fit it all in! Hence, I had more leave than I could take.

Leave wise, you get the standard 38 days (incl bank holidays). But you might get a few days 'relocation leave' added on, some post deployment leave added on, the CO may grant the whole unit a few extra days etc.. So the actual number of days you can take is often higher than that.

If I hadn't been on ski trips/mountain biking trips etc.. then I could probably have taken more leave, but I didn't want to miss those opportunities!

I hope that answers your questions, if you have any more, or need any clarification on the above, please let me know.