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31 Med. Sci. & L. 2 (1991)

handle is hein.journals/mdsclw31 and id is 1 raw text is: 2 Med. Sci. Law (1991) Vol. 31, No. 1 Editorial NEVILLE DAVIS, FRCGP FFOM Immediate Past-President, Section of Clinical Forensic Medicine, the Royal Society of Medicine Not all that long ago Professor David Gee described the newly-qualified UK doctors as 'forensically illiterate'. The generally poor rating given to the importance of forensic medicine in undergraduate curricula has in- evitably resulted in a situation where many doctors lack even the basic knowledge required to describe wounds accurately and the ability to draw reasonable conclusions as to their causa- tion. As to their medical obligations under the law, ignorance appears to be widespread, great- ly to the dismay of the medical defence bodies and no doubt now also to the Department of Health. Working closely with the law enforcement agencies, the Association of Police Surgeons (APS) has always striven to raise the clinical standards of its members, and its efforts have not been in vain, but not all police surgeons are members of APS. The Metropolitan Police has for some years conducted in-house courses for its forensic medical examiners, both for induc- tion and for updating in the light of changing legislation and technical progress. There is also a form of peer assessment undertaken prior to establishment. Elsewhere several con- stabularies are following similar lines and early this year the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) organized for the first time a course at Bramshill Staff College open to any doctor in contract with police. An awareness of the problem of marked variations in standards is accepted, but ACPO has in the past shied away from introducing mandatory assessment of police surgeons, presumably because of recruitment difficulties in many areas, so there is no real pressure to undertake post-graduate training. The General Medical Council appears to be unhappy about allocating precious time in the undergraduate curriculum to medico-legal instruction at the expense of other subjects, so the undergraduate scene is unlikely to change. APS members are encouraged to take the DMJ(Clin), but the uptake is poor, with only about 10% of its members holding the diploma. There is, in fact, no accredited post-graduate qualification in legal medicine, and any doctor may claim to be a medico-legal expert, discon- certing to the lawyers and especially to the courts, both civil and criminal, who have to assess the weight of medical evidence. The Royal College of Physicians of London has this year established a Standing Commit- tee on the Legal Aspects of Medicine (CLAM), charged to investigate the academic status of the medico-legal interface and to make recom- mendations. The committee has not yet reported, but it is clear that the need for im- provement has been identified, both for doctors in general and for those doctors such as police surgeons and their defence counterparts, prison medical officers, doctors assessing in- juries in civil compensation cases, or investigating alleged medical negligence and similar matters. The special academic needs of prison medical officers are being considered concurrently by a working party involving three Royal Colleges, the Physicians, the Psychiatrists and the General Practitioners together with the Prison Medical Directorate. It is likely that a working party set up by CLAM will recommend to its parent committee the establishment of a basic certificate in legal medicine, to be obtained after satisfactory com- pletion of a course whose syllabus will include all those medico-legal matters hitherto neglected in the undergraduate curriculum, to the level which should reasonably be expected

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