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Within normal surgery hours telephone consultations have been previously shown to make up between 10-20% of patient contacts with General Practitioners (GPs) and to comprise a large proportion of a GP's daily workload. Although obviously very useful, such doctor-patient interactions can be fraught with risk. The General Medical Council (GMC) requires that newly graduated doctors should be adaptable to the challenge of delivering treatment advice and management remotely. Yet, currently, there is limited specific training in telephone consultation skills in both undergraduate and postgraduate curricula. Authentic and properly supervised exposure of medical students to GP telephone consultations can be difficult to achieve in clinical placements. Therefore, we have developed emergency telephone consultations within our primary care Safe and Effective Clinical Outcomes (SECO) clinics which are simulated GP surgeries organised for our final year students. We have expanded the range of patients presenting in these clinics by including trained, simulated patients requesting an urgent telephone consultation with a GP. In doing so we aim to enhance our student's skills and confidence in conducting telephone consultations. This teaching exchange paper aims to describe the ideas behind the construction of simulated patient telephone scripts together with the difficulties and successes encountered in introducing telephone consultations into our GP SECO clinic. We hope these ideas and processes will stimulate and enable others to help students prepare for this challenging area of clinical medicine made increasingly significant by the Covid-19 pandemic.

It was interesting to read about increasing the flow and plugging the leaks for the GP workforce pipeline. 1 The initial stage of GP recruitment was stated to be during medical school but our experience of widening participation has made it start earlier. The Selecting for Excellence Final Report highlights the need for medical schools to support students from wideningparticipation backgrounds, the key role of doctors in widening participation, and how this can be supported. 2 The School of Medicine at Keele University this year arranged for visits for 17 local college students from widening-participation backgrounds to spend a day in general practice. This was one of their five core days of the Steps2Medicine scheme arranged by the School of Medicine. All students on the scheme with suitable exam grades are given a guaranteed interview at Keele. The students were given a list of 20 specific tasks to complete during 'My day in general practice'. These included listening to heart and lung sounds, taking a pulse, and watching a procedure such as venepuncture or an intramuscular injection. Students were encouraged to spend time with a GP, practice nurse, and at reception. We asked students for verbal and written feedback, which was almost entirely incredibly positive. Comments included 'Dr x is a huge role model', 'it [general practice] is an incredibly rewarding and diverse job', '[i]t's really interesting and varied and has increased my interest in the possibility of going into the job', and 'I loved the GP visit and it was an amazing experience which made me 100% sure that I want to go into medicine'. And what did the GPs who took part think? 'Brilliant', 'truly inspiring', and one GP commented that a student had said 'this has been the best day of my life!' We believe that such student visits could form part of the solution to the workforce crisis by encouraging and inspiring local students from any background, not just widening-participation backgrounds, to enter a career in general practice. And we may well have also stumbled on a way of improving GP retention, by reminding GPs just how inspirational they are!

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Mental health Your last issue focused on mental health including the mental health of doctors. 1 As a response to severe mental health problems suffered by colleagues, we approached the Scottish Poetry Library with the idea of producing a little book of poetry to act as a companion and comfort to new doctors when they begin their work. The result was Tools of the Trade, a book of short, accessible poems that all relate in some way to the experience of being a new doctor, which is given to all new Scottish doctors at graduation. 2 The poems are divided into sections, 'Looking after yourself', 'Looking after others', 'Beginnings', 'Being with illness', and 'Endings'. The book has been well received and we are now exploring ways of expanding the project and encouraging more young doctors to use poetry as a way of connecting with their creativity and compassion. More information about Tools of the Trade is available on the Scottish Poetry Library website (http://www.scottishpoetrylibrary. org.uk/) and in an article in the journal Education for Primary Care, 3 and we will be sharing our experiences of the book at the RCGP conference in October.