Printed in Great Britain Training in Community Medicine and Epidemiology in Britain

Over the past thirty years two government committees, the second of them a Royal Commission which reported in 1968, have had far-reaching effects on medical education in Britain. The Commission defined community medicine as being concerned 'not with the treatment of individual patients but with broad questions of health and disease in, for example, particular geographical and occupational sections of the community and in the community at large'. It recommended that every medical school should have a department of community medicine, and that doctors working in this field should form a professional body which would accept responsibility for setting standards in specialist postgraduate education in the subject. This led to the formation of the Faculty of Community Medicine of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the United Kingdom. The reorganization of the National Health Service which will come into effect in April 1974 depends heavily for its success on specialists in community medicine who will hold key administrative posts at district, area, regional and national level and whose competence is expected to include the ability to practise epidemiology. Details of the postgraduate training programme recommended by the Faculty are given, and steps taken to implement other relevant recommendations of the Royal Commission are described. This year the British Parliament passed an Act (1) that will have far-reaching effects on the Nationa