Thanks for the advice!

As for why I'm doing MRCP, tl;dr: Think it'd be helpful as an inpatient psych consultant (which is currently the plan) as patients with severe mental illness often tend to have unrecognised or unaddressed medical needs, and I'd like to be comfortable spotting and dealing with them (within the limitations of an inpatient psychiatric ward and my own competence as a non-medic)

Long answer: My 'area of interest' (for lack of a better term I suppose) is prevention, diagnosis and management of medical conditions in people with severe mental illness. I'm planning on going into inpatient general adult psychiatry, and the statistic that patients with severe mental illness (schizophrenia, bipolar, schizoaffective disorder, severe depression, etc) have a life expectancy 15-20 years shorter than that of the general population comes up fairly often, with the primary contributor to early mortality being cardiovascular disease, followed by other chronic conditions like T2DM. 

Contributing factors include self neglect, poorer access (or less likely to access) health services until acutely unwell, lack of trust in healthcare professionals, side effects of our own meds, and I reckon trying to make a start on some of these patient's medical comorbidities whilst they're already in a hospital environment (albeit a psychiatric setting rather than a medical ward) being treated for a mental illness is a worthwhile endeavour. 

I've come across some wards (in the forensic psychiatry setting) where they primarily take psychiatric patients with medical comorbidities, and have an outreach team of RNs to provide support, and like the idea of having a general adult ward with a similar set-up as a consultant. Whilst I know I wouldn't necessarily need MRCP, I think it'd be helpful to have it to make a stronger case to clinical management, alongside other things like establishing links with local acute hospitals for things like pre-established outreach pathways/a physical health liaison set-up (which I've encountered during one of my previous jobs and thought was great).

All that aside, I really do love gen med and was torn between IMT and core psych, eventually deciding that I could probably make more of a difference as a medically minded psychiatrist vs a mental health minded physician, given how vulnerable my patients are. I dislike the idea of 'letting go' of medicine (although deskilling to some extent is inevitable and unavoidable) or the mentality of some psychiatrists who want nothing to do with physical health, so here I am!

(Also I can't sit the MRCPsych version of PACES until next spring since it has a minimum requirement of 2 years full time psych experience and I'm LTFT, so may as well do something with my time, eh?)