Major reforms of the tuition process, outlined yesterday by the Royal College of Surgeons, will allow trainees to be fast-tracked to consultants in as little as seven years.

The new system, which could see fully qualified surgeons as young as 30, is designed to speed the rise of junior doctors set on surgical specialties, most of whom currently spend years in general medical training.

It is also hoped that the timetable — which will let doctors opt out and then rejoin the training programme — will also encourage more women into surgery who had feared sacrificing the chance to have children.

Hugh Phillips, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, said that it was vital that an outdated curriculum was overhauled to guarantee the highest quality of surgeons for future generations. Instead of leaving doctors drifting for years in junior roles, the new system would target those with an aptitude for surgery and fast-track them into their desired specialty, he said.

“The arrangement for training is not efficient,” he said. “How can we possibly accept a situation where young people spend up to five years at the level of a senior house officer without any sign of progress?” At present there are more than 3,500 senior house officers waiting to become specialist registrars — when a junior doctor develops surgical specialties — but less than half will eventually progress to this stage. Under the new system, they will be able to progress in just two years. “There are too many talented surgeons-in-training stuck at this grade,” Mr Phillips said. “Not only is this wasteful of human resources, it makes for an insecure and difficult time at a crucial stage in the surgeon’s career.”

The new curriculum will be introduced in 2007, with pilot schemes due to start in England and Wales from next year.

Mr Phillips, an orthopaedic surgeon, said there was also an urgent need to address the work pressures created by government targets that were preventing consultants from spending time passing on their expertise to junior doctors.

“There is now an incentive which gives surgeons £100 for treating an additional patient (to help to meet government targets),” he said. “I would rather surgeons were incentivised to train instead of taking the extra case. It may not appeal to ministers, but it has got be the way forward.”

Referring to the public image of surgical training epitomised by Sir Lancelot Spratt, the razor-tongued consultant who terrorised junior medics in Doctor in the House, Mr Phillips said that draconian, male-dominated age of surgery was at an end. With almost 70 per cent of medical students now being women, the discipline had to adapt to cater for females or face serious staffing consequences, he said.

“Sir Lancelot Spratt and his white-coated entourage is dead,” he said. “That, I’m afraid, is not the way surgery and surgical training can be delivered. We must get real about the surgical workforce. Unless we attract women into surgery, the only people we can choose from will be just 30 per cent of medical graduates.”

Of the more than 5,200 consultant surgeons in the country, just 6 per cent — 281 surgeons — are women, with the highest proportion of females found in disciplines such as paediatrics and breast surgery. Other schemes to encourage women into the workforce include tax breaks on childcare.

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