In‐medium chiral symmetry breaking in confining potential models of QCD is examined. The summing of ring diagrams is investigated as a resolution to the infrared divergence problem in the gap equations. We present the first determination of the temperature‐density phase diagram for two model systems. We find that observables and the phase structure of the confinement models depend strongly on whether vacuum polarisation is accounted for. Finally, it appears that standard confinement models cannot adequately describe both hadron phenomenology and in‐medium properties of QCD.