Soaring through 2017-2018
An overview of developments in SOAR
Supporting SOAR Users
During 2017/2018, the SOAR helpdesk resolved 6895 enquiries – about a hundred less compared to the year before. Of the queries we dealt with, nearly half (49%) were from Secondary Care users (Consultants and Secondary Care Admin teams); a third (30%) were from Primary Care users (including Admin teams); and Trainee queries came to 16%; and queries from MSF Raters, Pharmacists, Receptionists, GP Practice Managers, and DME's (Directors of Medical Education) and EO's (Educational Organisations) and Others make up the rest (5%).
There was a significant number of MSF queries this year (1869 / 27%), mostly from folks who wished to repeat their MSF in preparation for their next Revalidation. 1038 tickets revolved around helping users log in to SOAR (15%); and 775 tickets (11%) were submitted to help with the appraisal form queries (submission, Form 4, uploading queries).
Attendance in the live SOAR demos continued to drop in 2017/2018. As such, a decision was made to cease the provision of these sessions as of December 2017. User guidance for SOAR is available on the Medical Appraisal Scotland website, and the helpdesk is always there for anyone with questions around SOAR. Plans are in place to provide short video guides to SOAR in early 2018/2019 in addition to the existing guidance.
1Figures taken from Zendesk support system
Review of MSF Options
SOAR continues the provision of MSF via our 3rd party provider, WASP Software. This arrangement has been extended through to the end of March 2019, covering the 2018/2019 period.
As had been reported last year, NES had just commissioned a 360 tool for those in Leadership role. We contacted the development company responsible for this project and initiated a feasibility study to determine options to extend this tool for wider multi-disciplinaries. Due to technical complications with the way Leadership360 was initially built, we decided not to pursue this in 2017/2018; but hope to explore this further in 2018/2019 for a one 360 tool approach for all disciplines.
Repeat MSF
Originally NES was funded to only provide MSF for the first cycle of Revalidation; and this was how the WASP system was set up with SOAR. To help facilitate those who wished to do a second MSF via WASP, we would have needed to go in to WASP to manually delete the report to enable the repeat MSF.
To help ease the burden of manually deleting MSF's on WASP, a clear down of completed and downloaded MSF reports (pre-March 2015) was scheduled for December. Additionally, a new protocol has been set up (to ensure GDPR compliance) where WASP will run a scheduled data clear down annually.
SOAR team changes
In September, after 3 ½ years with the SOAR team, Kris Wright joined the wider Turas team within NES. Kris is dedicated, hardworking and an important part of the team – SOAR’s loss is Turas’ immense gain. We wish Kris the best of luck in this new step in his career.
In November, Michael Teasdale joined the SOAR development team from the Scottish Medical Training Recruitment Team within NES, where he was the Recruitment Manager. Prior to this, Michael fulfilled various web development roles within the SMT team including Junior Developer and Application Support. Michael attained academic qualifications in computing (BEng Hons Computing 2:1) and has built up experience in web development, data administration and data analysis.
SOAR in house development
Although the team change did bring a degree of interruption to our progress, Michael was quick to pick up the pace and we were able to get back on track quickly. We consolidated our learning and began our first significant development project in January (CPD Log refinement, and various misc fixes) which we hope to deploy in April / May 2018.
A note of all development efforts can be found on the Medical Appraisal Scotland website once they have been deployed.
http://www.appraisal.nes.scot.nhs.uk/help-me-with/soar/about-soar/deployhistory.aspx
Other developments
Reporting Tools on SOAR
Following a thorough review of existing reports on SOAR in collaboration with the Local Admin teams, we determined that a number of the required reports are slight variations of each other. An Export to Spreadsheet function was created in the User Search, Appraisee, Appraiser, and Interview pages to facilitate this so that Admins can download the data and remove what columns they don’t need from the spreadsheet.
This reduced the number of proposed reports significantly, and most of them have been worked on in the last quarter of 2017 / 2018. Pending internal testing, finalised reports should be deployed in April / May 2018.
Service Level Agreement (SLA) with Developers
A new Service Level Agreement (SLA) was agreed with our developers for 2017/2018, initially for 6 months. This ensured that SOAR is properly supported during our training period. This was extended to the full year following team change in September.
On the face of it, 2017/2018 has been a relatively quiet year for SOAR due to the lack of significant achievements. This is far from the truth. Over the past 12 months, the SOAR team has undergone significant training to ensure the team is skilled up to a level where we can take on development work in house. The team’s growth and capacity are reflected in the SLA that has recently been renewed for 2018 / 2019 – this was renewed (at reduced support days) at £13,200 (+VAT), nearly £20k less than previous year.
Future projects and Impacts
SOAR Helpdesk
The proposed change in SOAR’s helpdesk support software remains in the pipeline as further refinements are added to the new system. In the interim SOAR will continue to use its existing setup (with Zendesk), and the move to the new software (ServiceNow) delayed until early 2019.
From a user’s point of view, there is no change or impact on them. All SOAR queries will continue to be sent to SOAR@nes.scot.nhs.uk and they will be picked up and actioned as per normal.
Recognition of Trainer (RoT) Quality Assurance
In collaboration with the five Medical Universities in Scotland, NES is working on a QA process for ROT.
There are some minor functions that would help the process on SOAR and we hope to work on this in 2018 / 2019.
A notable change is that the Scottish Trainer Framework website is now hosted by the Scottish Deanery website:
http://www.scotlanddeanery.nhs.scot/trainer-information/scottish-trainer-framework/
- please update your bookmarks.
Multi-Disciplines on SOAR?
We reported last year of interests from Dental colleagues in the use of SOAR for their appraisal process. Due to limited resources and capacity, this was not carried out in 2017 / 2018.
Interest in the use of SOAR from other disciplines has increased, with noted interests from Public Heath Doctors and Physician Assistants. We hope to explore options to expand SOAR to cater for multiple medical professional groups in 2018 / 2019, rather than just tagging on another specialty on to SOAR. We will keep colleagues updated on progress of this if and as it happens.
Web hosting and platform changes
As part of SOAR’s move into the NES Digital directorate, it is envisaged that SOAR will be moving to the Turas platform in the future. The first step of this is to move the web hosting, which we have initiated in March 2018. We hope to have this ready by March / April 2019, which will set up the foundations for the move to the Turas platform when the time comes.
GDPR Changes
Following user feedback, a “News Alert” function was introduced on SOAR in 2014 – as a means to communicate with all system users, advising of any potential system downtime for maintenance or deployment etc.
Use of this function extended (as the situation arose) to notifying Appraisers and/or Appraisees of significant changes to Appraisal and Revalidation. We have also used it to alert Appraisers to our annual conference and to book their place etc.
We also extended the function so that Local health board admin teams can send messages out to their doctors to flag any significant local issues.
To ensure GDPR compliance, which was rolled out on 25 May 2018, a thorough review of the SOAR data policies took place, supported by the NES Information Governance team. Minimal changes were made to the policies as SOAR does not share any of its data with other systems. However, changes were made on the News Alert function.
All messages are now tagged in a category, which users are invited to opt-in to. Users will only receive email notifications regarding these messages if they have opted in to these categories:
- Local Health Board Updates
- Appraisal and Revalidation
- NES run Events
- Non-NES run Events
- Other
System Notifications and Reminder emails - e.g. reminders to sign off Form 4 - will remain and cannot be opted out of.
Additionally, the function to send messages is now restricted to System and Local Admin teams only; and Local Admins can only send out “Local Health Board updates”.
If you have not already done so, please login to SOAR to select the categories you wish to opt in to, to receive notifications as and when messages are sent.
We strongly recommend that you opt-in to "Local Health Board Update" messages so that you are notified when your Health Board Admins circulate any important messages.
If you are an Appraiser, please consider opting in to the NES-run events so that you are kept informed about the Annual Medical Appraisers conference.
NHS Education for Scotland
Westport 102
West Port
Edinburgh
EH3 9DN
© NHS Education for Scotland 2018. You can copy or reproduce the information in this document for use within NHSScotland and for non-commercial educational purposes. Use of this document for commercial purposes is permitted only with the written permission of NES.