At time of writing it is now approximately two and a half years since I took up the post of Training Manager for Medical Appraisal and it has been an eventful period.

 

During that time we have seen extremes in the level of demand for delivery of our courses, from creating and delivering additional courses during 2016 and 2017 to meet the operational needs of the Health Boards, to the more recent period where demand from Primary and Secondary Care has dropped off resulting in either course cancellations or downsizing the number of delegates being accommodated. The latter aspect has also been affected by Service Pressures in the Boards as we have seen an increase in the number of delegate cancellations in order that they can meet the demands of their regular role and operating environment.

 

This drop in demand has, however, allowed us to explore new potential professional user groups who may require our services in terms of training for appraisal and the use of the SOAR system as a method of reflecting appraisal, CPD, and other documentary evidence requirements that may be relevant to their particular regulator.

 

In this context we have continued to provide Appraiser training courses for Public Service Dentists employed by the Health Boards, the most recent phase of this successfully training 30 PDS clinicians.

 

We are continuing dialogue around a potential further tranche of training with a view to adding relevant courses to the training schedule – see link for this later in this article.

 

We are also in negotiations with Public Health clinicians in Scotland as their regulator is moving to a formal appraisal and revalidation process later this year and we anticipate that we will be developing courses for late 2018/2019.

We have transitioned the course training venues into NES premises over the last year to 18 months and this has been relatively successful, however we are still open to facilitating an event on Board premises or Board sourced commercial venues if the need and opportunity arises, as this may enable us to reach those located further out from the Central Belt/Aberdeen/Inverness areas of Scotland.

 

The current schedule of courses is advertised on the Medical Appraisal Scotland website under Events

www.appraisal.nes.scot.nhs.uk/events.aspx

Going forward, the plan is to have training delivery schedules that mirror the appraisal year and run from April to March.

Forecasting potential course demand and developing an appropriate course delivery schedule remains the biggest challenge that we face and we recognise that it is not necessarily an easy task for Board Leads and Appraisal Admin Leads/teams to readily know if or when an existing appraiser may no longer be willing or able to continue in that role.

 

We remain committed to meeting any emergent demand as soon as we can however as our course tutors are clinicians themselves then they too are subject to service demands in their regular roles so it usually takes around 3 months from identification of a course being required to being able to secure all the resources (venue, tutors, support staff etc) in order to run the training event.

 

We would ask that the above be taken into consideration when looking to source additional training events.