Welcome everyone to the Medical Appraisal's 2024 Winter Newsletter, an informal year-end update on our progress in various projects.
We hope you find this useful and as ever, all feedback is welcomed!
William Liu
Training Manager (Medical Appraisal)
One of the main projects we have been working on this year has been the redesign of appraisee functions on SOAR (Scottish Online Appraisal Resource). This project started 2 years ago with the national all-user survey to determine what was working well for users on SOAR and what could be better. The overwhelming feedback was that the appraisees' user journey needed to be improved, and that we should update the login mechanism.
An external developer was appointed and work began late last year. We have kept everyone informed of this project's progress via video newsletters, and I am pleased to say that we are reaching the end of the development.
We will be deploying in early January 2025 in two separate deploys - full details in our news update.
After the system is live, we will run a week of lunch time webinars/demos for users to drop in as needed and ask any questions they may have.
We have also been working on updating the Scottish Medical Appraisal and Revalidation Toolkit, as well as guidance on SOAR, to match up to the new Good Medical Practice (GMP) 2024. We will publish these updates to coincide with the system changes.
In the meantime, please make sure you have a Turas account and have it linked to SOAR.
The annual Medical Appraisal and Revalidation Quality Assurance (MARQA) review looks at the appraisal completion rate and revalidation data across all designated bodies in Scotland. The review, sponsored by Scottish Government, was paused during the pandemic in 2020 and restarted this year.
Mirroring the post COVID restart of appraisal, it was decided that the review would take a light-touch approach with a streamlined questionnaire pack. This would help the review panel, who met up in the summer, to get a sense of where we are with appraisals and revalidation in Scotland.
The finalised report was presented to the Revalidation Advisory Board Scotland in November and you can find this on our website.
I am pleased to confirm that we will be hosting our annual appraisers conference this year, albeit a little later than usual.
SAVE THE DATE: 3rd February 2025
The event will be held remotely via MS Teams. We will send out registration details and programme in due course (make sure to opt in to the “NES run Events” option in the SOAR News Alert function).
It will be a scaled back event with a view to returning to a full(er) event in September 2025.
Following the introduction of the updated GMP 2024, we updated all our training course modules to ensure the guidance is updated accordingly. We took the opportunity over the summer to redesign and convert all the modules from PowerPoint to video format:
https://www.appraisal.nes.scot.nhs.uk/appraiser-training/new-appraiser/pre-course-modules/
Feedback from participants and tutors has been positive, with existing appraisers finding the modules useful as a refresher for themselves.
Thus far in 2024/25, we have run x11 New Appraisers, x13 Refreshers and x3 “Improving Appraisal Conversations” workshops (for experienced appraisers looking for more practical sessions); with attendance of 74, 104 and 25 respectively.
The 2025/2026 Appraiser Training programme is being finalised and we are aiming to publish this in February 2025. Details of this will be published on our website, which will include details of the remainder of the 2024/25 programme.
With the commencement of Physician Associates (PAs) and Anaesthesia Associate (AAs) registration with the General Medical Council (GMC), NHS NES are recommending they use of Scottish Online Appraisal Resource (SOAR) as the primary application to record the evidence for their revalidation. This is based on requirements gathered from a sample of PAs/AAs, appraisers, and service representatives.
The GMC have identified that there will be a requirement for an annual revalidation. Whilst at this stage they have not set out the full revalidation rules, pending the outcome of a consultation, they have started that they will be asking for the revalidation to mirror the six categories currently required for doctors. The adoption of SOAR will provide a single platform for practitioners and supervisors across Scotland and allow users to link to GMC Connect for the submission of evidence.
Locally employed doctors (LED) / Clinical Fellows (CFs) are working at trainee level and are not part of the ARCP process that includes the appraisal for trainees.
SOAR - the national IT system designed to facilitate medical appraisals - is aimed at consultants and SAS doctors rather than trainees. However, a pilot project (led by NES) has been set up to look at how best to support the appraisal of this group of doctors. We aim to report on the pilot's findings in a year's time.
There will be helpdesk support on SOAR during the festive holiday period from 23rd December, albeit slower than usual. Normal service will resume on 3rd January 2025.
Please continue to send your SOAR tickets to the helpdesk via SOAR@nes.scot.nhs.uk
And finally...
As part of the overall organisational restructuring, the NES senior teams are reviewing the role of Clinical Lead for Appraisal and Revalidation following Dr Christiane Shrimpton's retirement in May this year. In the interim, any queries that normally would go to Dr Shrimpton is to be directed to the Training Manager, who will escalate and respond accordingly.
Mandie Thrippleton's stay with us as Admin Officer has come to an end following the conclusion of her fixed term contract. Recruitment plans are ongoing for a part-time role.
We are grateful to Christiane and Mandie for their contributions over the years and wish them all the very best for the future, they will both be greatly missed.
And now, it is my absolute privilege and pleasure to introduce to you our newest and youngest recruit, Struan Asrih Douglas - our new Chief Cuteness Officer. Struan arrives after 9 months "observing" as Hannah Asrih's understudy and will take up the role as soon as legally allowed. Mum on the other hand will be back with the team as Admin Officer in summer of 2025.
On behalf of all the team, we wish you all a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year when it comes!
This page was last updated on: 21/12/2024
