About Hospital Specialty

There are over 50 recognised specialties in medical training. The curricula for these training programmes are approved by the GMC (external site) and the associated Royal Colleges, and in Scotland NHS Education for Scotland (NES) oversees and ensures delivery of training in these programmes.

Programmes are either regional or national. A regional programme is based in one of the four regions in Scotland, and these tend to be the more general specialties, for example, core medicine, or anaesthetics. National programmes cover two or more regions and these are likely to be the very specialist areas such as forensic psychiatry, or cardiothoracic surgery.

Find out more about our speciality programmes.

You can find out more about the health boards and hospital sites where the training programmes are based by visiting Scotland's Health on the Web (external site).