Newsletter content/transcript:
Hello everyone, my name is William Liu, I am the Training Manager for Medical Appraisal here at NES and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to this festive video update. There is quite a bit to cover so let’s get cracking, and I will start with some news on MSF.
The provision of multisource feedback on SOAR through the WASP Software has been in place since 2011/12 coinciding with the formal launch of revalidation. Funded initially by Scottish government, the project was to ensure all doctors working in Scotland had access to MSF during their first revalidation cycle. From there, the maintenance and continued provision of the system was taken over by NES through a service level agreement with WASP.
One of the drawbacks of this setup is that because the project was funded and designed for one revalidation cycle, it meant anyone needing to repeat their MSF would need us to manually delete the old one before they could start afresh.
Coupled with its aging platform, an agreement was reached with WASP to update the setup this year. I am pleased to say we will be rolling out the changes after the new year. Which is very timely because…
As some of you might be aware, we’ve recently experienced an issue with nominated rater emails going straight to their junk folders. This seems to have happened overnight and has caused quite a disruption to appraisees and raters alike.
We have tested this ourselves and it seems to mainly impact those using NHS emails. We can’t say for sure what happened but suspect somewhere in Microsoft’s security infrastructure something got changed, our best guess is that their junk filters were upgraded.
To remedy this, my team has been working hard and very proactive in making sure the disruption to users is minimised by reaching out to the raters where possible, to send out their individual rater links. As you can imagine it is quite a time-consuming challenge.
We have reached out to WASP and various IT colleagues, and we believe we have a solution for this. We will be changing it so that all WASP messages are sent via the SOAR helpdesk email address. We hope to make this go live along with the WASP redesign. However this will impact those who are looking to do MSF over the holidays.
So here is the plan of action:
If you need to initiate a new MSF, please do so BEFORE Thursday 21 December. There after we will disable access WASP to allow these reports to proceed and conclude.
Then, on January 8th, we will go live with the new system which will include the rater email fix.
Those who started their MSF before 21 December should hopefully have their reports ready by the week beginning 15th January and we will assist with manual closing or downloading as needed.
One of the features of the new set up is the implementation of a data retention policy, where any reports downloaded to SOAR are automatically deleted from WASP after 4 months. This means, unless you are repeating your MSF within 4 months of your last one, you shouldn’t need to contact the helpdesk for assistance.
So, to reiterate - if you need to do your MSF over the holiday period, you need to complete the self assessment questionnaire and nominate all your raters before 21 December. Otherwise, we would be grateful if you would hold off on this until after 8 January.
If you need help with any of this please reach out to the helpdesk. (More information in News section.)
Let’s take a quick look back over the past 12 months.
Last year, NES was part of a Scottish government short life working group looking at guidance for appraisal and revalidation in Scotland. The output of this was an updated guidance document helping appraisees to prepare for their appraisals. This was published towards the end of last year, accompanied by a message from the CMO. You can find the full and updated documents on the Medical Appraisal Scotland website.
In February and March this year we successfully recruited 6 experienced appraisers to join our appraiser training tutors cohort and in April we ran a development event for everyone in this group.
In June we ran 2 in-person training courses which were very well received; and in July we got the go ahead for the SOAR redevelopment appraisees project, but more on that shortly.
In August we published our annual report and more significantly, as you will no doubt be aware, the GMC also published the updated Good Medical Practice 2024; and they came and spoke to our appraisers at our annual conference which took place in September. The event was run remotely via Microsoft Teams Webinar and feedback was very positive.
Of course, let’s not forget our main activities, our appraiser training courses.
This has been a very busy year for us, with 20 New Appraiser and 20 Refresher Appraiser courses scheduled. We also organised a series of workshops as part of the Refresher programme of activities, exploring the use of mentoring and coaching skills in appraisal, based on the Egan Skilled helper model and the GROW model respectively.
I am pleased to confirm that out of the 11 New Appraiser courses we have ran this year it was attended by 78 participants; we also had 132 appraisers attend 16 Refreshers; 25 appraisers from 4 Egan workshops and 19 attended the 2 GROW sessions organised.
The big event this year as mentioned already was our annual conference, the first standalone conference since 2014 and more than 250 appraisers participated, and feedback was very positive and welcomed by many appraisers.
If you want to catch up on this year’s conference videos please visit the Medical Appraisal Scotland website.
We still have a number of training courses and there’s still some places left. Additionally, we have two webinars scheduled. We invited the GMC to speak to our appraisers about the updated GMP 2024 and what resources would be available to appraisers and what it means for appraisal. This will take place on 13th February. We also have a further session on ROT scheduled for 5th March to be run by Dr Christiane Shrimpton focusing on appraisers and what they should discuss with appraisees who have trainer roles.
These two webinars will be recorded and you don’t need to register to access the video afterwards.
All information and booking instructions will be on our website.
So, the big development this year is the SOAR redesign for appraisees. Over the next few slides I will cover how did this come about, what's being changed, what it will look like and a timetable of activities.
Cast your minds back to last summer, you may recall that we ran a system-wide user survey asking for your input on what is and isn’t working for you on SOAR. This survey was sponsored by the Scottish government and carried out by our external partners. 734 of you responded and a number of you also took part in subsequent workshops.
A report of findings was presented to the national stakeholders group, with the main recommendations focusing on improving the appraisee user experience and the login mechanism as the main priorities.
A set of design ideas was presented to the group in July where Scottish government agreed to fund the project. Work on this began in September right after the conference, when we met with the appointed external developers to discuss and map out the various aspects of the project.
As per feedback and comments from the survey, we focussed on simplifying the appraisal forms and processes, such as the CPD log, PDP and supporting information. By doing so we also explored how the appraisee workflow on SOAR could be improved.
To help us, a volunteer users group was convened, selected randomly from those who took part in last year’s survey. We have been engaging with them and solicitating their feedback on certain key design areas.
So far, here is what we have produced:
This is the proposed new "My current appraisal" page. We have removed references to form numbers and domains so appraisees will no longer need to worry about what goes in Form 1 or Form 3, or what should I upload in domain 2 or 4 etc.
Instead we have lifted out the supporting information as a separate column so it’s more explicit to users on what they need to upload at appraisal.
We haven’t removed any sections, but have we removed a lot of duplicates, duplicating questions and streamlined it to a more user friendly design,
If we take a look at the CPD section for example:
The functionality hasn’t changed, just a cleaner and simplified design.
For those who uses their college or their own logs, they upload their logs via the Supporting documents tab:
Where you can also upload any other relevant information. There is a place for appraisees to document their reflections. And if needed:
Guidance is also available so users know what is required every appraisal, along with links to the GMC website for further support. There will be different guidance for different support information to let users know what they need to submit for their revalidation.
The design you see is based on the NES Turas framework. This is in order for us to utilise their 2-factor login feature, which means that SOAR is being integrated as an application on the Turas platform.
Go live?
So that’s how it will end up looking, and in terms of when it will go live, we are currently working on changing the existing SOAR to map to the updated GMP and we hope to complete this by March with a view to deployment in April. The main appraisee redesign we hope to be completed by June and go live by mid to late July.
When it’s ready, we will notify all users via the SOAR News Alert system.
Period of transition...
When the new appraisee redesign goes live, there will be a period of transition for those who are midway through their appraisals.
There will be some who will have supporting information in the wrong section in the submitted forms. We will do our best to minimise this but if it happens, please do not ask appraisees to resubmit – so long as all the information is there, please excuse the misplacing of documents in incorrect sections during this transitional period. It is not a fault of the appraisees. This is in part due to the removing and merging of duplicate questions and the mapping to the new GMP. Once this appraisal is concluded, everything should map to the correct sections next appraisal. The important thing is that the required information is there, the appraisal discuss and reflections was had and documented accordingly on Form 4.
Thank you.
So we’ve already covered the WASP and SOAR appraisee development.
We are currently working on the 2024/25 schedule and are aiming to publish these on the website around end of February/early March. We’re also busy working on updating the training course resources as well as the guidance and tools on the website to make sure everything is mapped to the latest Good Medical Practice.
Our conference this year was organised based on your feedback, through a desire to have our own event away from the NES Medical Education event to allow those with multiple roles to fully engage with both conferences. We are currently organising next year’s event - as soon as a date and sessions and speakers are confirmed, we will communicate this via SOAR, so make sure you opt in to receive “NES-run events” News Alerts.
But in the meantime please do get in touch if you have any ideas or suggestions for next year’s conference.
So that’s it for our festive update, but it won’t be very festive if I didn’t acknowledge and thank a few people, but before I do allow me to share a recent experience with you.
Over this past year I’ve helped out at a number of appraiser courses and in the New Appraiser courses we are increasingly having more and more people come in wanting to take up the role of appraiser because they’ve had such supportive appraisals in the last few years and that is down to the amazing work you do as appraisers.
So thank you everyone for the incredible work you do, my thanks also to our cohort of appraiser course tutors and facilitators for your dedication, my thanks to Dr Christiane Shrimpton for her guidance and leadership, my thanks to our appraisal leads and health board appraisal admin teams for their continued support, and my eternal thanks to my amazing team who makes me look competent!
I get a lot of complements from appraisers about how well the courses run and how well supported they feel with the helpdesk and it’s all down to these hard-working ladies.
So on behalf of Christiane, myself and the whole team, have a lovely and safe festive break and Happy New Year when it comes everyone!
This page was last updated on: 15/12/2023
