ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how education and training is constructed and influenced by specific ideologies of practice, in particular the notion of care. It explores, through the central concept of care, the difference between how to give appropriate care in unanticipated or unpredictable clinical situations and how care is treated as a major concept within medical, surgical and clinical guidelines. The chapter touches on some of the themes of practice advocated by the person-centred-care movement. Two specific categories of care are examined; ‘real’ and ‘official’. The former relates to actual experiences of giving and receiving care, whilst the latter encompasses the ways in which care is represented and deployed in professional texts and policy documents. An analytic approach based on the writings of Michel Foucault (Faubion 2002) is constructed to examine the discourses and practices that constitute forms of care and which influence the aims and objectives of medical training and surgical education. A selection of professional texts authored by the General Medical Council and Royal College of Surgeons of England are analysed and contrasted with an actual example of practice.
