Welcome to the Severn Postgraduate School of Ophthalmology website. This is the way the ophthalmology faculty will keep you up to date about training days, courses, recruitment, ARCP and RITA schedules as well as other useful and important information to facilitate your training.
Every trainee in the School of Ophthalmology is required to create a user account and password for this website. In the near future, your password will give you access to information and tools to help you communicate with your colleagues and with the school of surgery. In the coming months we will be adding more content to these pages; please bookmark this site and check back on a regular basis to make sure you are fully up-to-date.
As part of the account setup process, you will be asked to provide a contact email address and telephone number; these will be the school's primary media for communication with you. It is very important that you keep these details up-to-date as you move around the Severn Deanery.
Instructions for creating your user account have been emailed to you. If you have not received the email, please contact our support team using the link below. Please note that because of our security policies, forgotten passwords cannot be recovered, but must be reset. If you have forgotten your password, please reset it via the login page.
Ophthalmology is proving to be one of the most popular subspecialities and competition for run through training places is fierce, with a ratio of 1:40 applicants for every training post on offer. It is therefore imperative that particular attention is paid to the way in which you complete your application form.
The fields covered in our application form in 2009 were:
The personal statement is particularly important as we are looking for evidence that you fully research your decision to pursue a career in ophthalmology, that you have shown some commitment to this career choice in your undergraduate and early postgraduate training, evidence of skills and activities which would suggest you have the aptitude to become a successful microsurgeon, but also of interest to us as well is achievements and interests outside of medicine.
Unfortunately many candidates do not do themselves justice when completing the application form. Underneath there is some basic advice on avoiding common pitfalls which could disadvantage your application.
- It is very important to answer precisely what the question is asking you for. A surprising number of candidates do not give the information requested and instead put down what they would apparently like to tell us. There are no marks if you don’t answer the question you are being asked! Make sure you read the instructions for each question very carefully. You may well be able to answer some of the questions partly by cutting and pasting from your CV. However if you do this you must still read through carefully what your final answer says and check that all aspects of the question have been fully answered.
- Pay particular attention to good grammar, punctuation and clarity in your application. Do not rely solely on spell and grammar checkers. Only careful proof reading will fully exclude any errors. Think about the impression you are giving us.
- Make all your entries and particularly the personal statement flow well. Use normal prose, this is much easier to follow than talking like a telegram in an attempt to save space when there are word limits to questions. Use paragraphs or bullet points as these make your application easier to follow.
- Try to avoid abbreviations - you may think everyone knows what they mean but they may not be familiar to the person assessing your application.
- We strongly advise you to ask your Educational Supervisor or another Consultant to read through your application and suggest any improvements. Provided they do not actually write the application for you and that you are not making any dishonest claims this is quite legitimate and makes sure that you are showing us your achievements as clearly as you can.