Data taken from inhouse Applications Tracker database and SOAR, downloaded on 17/05/2019. Excludes dental and other disciplines and non-NHS bodies).

Due to NES’ involvement with the MARQA report (see Events and News page), we will no longer publish appraisal completion data from SOAR. Instead, we will further explore statistics on the Medical Appraiser workforce.

* These health boards have more Primary Care Appraisers on SOAR, but not all are assigned to an Appraisee.

** Please note that that a proportion of these are Educational Supervisors and University Appraisers who are not NES-trained.

*** There are some Secondary Care Appraisers added to SOAR by health boards for the purposes of joint appraisals with Academic Medicine only.

**** NSS is now responsible for appraisal admin for all smaller specialty health boards, e.g. NES, Health Scotland, HIS, Scottish Government.

Excluding dental and other disciplines, 1905 New Medical Appraisers have been trained since 2003 (up to March 2019).

** Some pre-existing SC Appraisers were recognised as NES-Trained Appraisers via Experienced / Refresher courses (instead of the New Appraiser courses)

NES took on responsibility for training Secondary Appraisers from 2010 ahead of formal introduction of Medical Revalidation. As part of this, a number of existing SC Appraisers were allowed to attend a 1-day Refresher / Experienced course (instead of the 2-day courses) to make them eligible to be recognised as a NES Trained Appraiser rather than attend a 2-day New Appraiser course. This practice has ceased following the conclusion of the first cycle of Revalidation. All new Appraisers must now be NES-trained via the 2-day New Appraiser courses. Since 2003 NES has trained 1905 New Appraisers, of which 1293 (67%) are still active with an Appraiser role on SOAR; 625 are no longer active (33%).

** Pilot Secondary Care Appraiser courses (2010) and First cycle of Revalidation (2011-2016)

Prior to the formal introduction of Medical Revalidation in 2011, NES ran a number of pilot courses for the training of Secondary Care Appraisers. Including these, NES trained 1246 New Appraisers in the first cycle of Revalidation (from 2010 – 2016).  However, 49 of the 1246 NES-trained Appraisers did not carry out an appraisal on SOAR. Reasons for this could vary from ill health, to lack of vacancy, to unexpected increase in workload. It is difficult to track and monitor this, but we hope to be able to address this by future SOAR development, which should help improve our planning and adjust our training courses as appropriate.

Generally, Health Boards are asked to organise matching Appraisees to newly trained Appraisers as soon as possible to ensure they put their new skills into practice and reinforce their learning from the course. However, this may not always be the case if Appraiser allocation has been completed early in the year, or there are no vacancies or Appraisees to appraise.

The data above was taken in mid-May 2019, which includes those who became Appraisers in the latter half of the year (where they may not have been allocated an Appraisee yet). If we exclude the latter half of the 2018 / 2019 period (so from April 2016 to June 2018), the number of NES-trained Appraisers who have not conducted any appraisals on SOAR is reduced from 49 to 14 (5.4%); suggesting 35 newly trained Appraisers awaiting Appraisees allocation: