NHS Education for Scotland

The last few months have been challenging for all those working in the health and care services. As a result of this pandemic, appraisal and revalidation activities quite rightly were temporarily put on hold so that colleagues could focus on helping with the pandemic. There will necessarily be a great deal of learning for many colleagues which hopefully will be captured in their appraisal discussions over the coming years.

There has also been a lot of focus on health and wellbeing of staff during these challenging times and our experienced appraisers will no doubt take the opportunity of delving into these areas once the appraisal processes begin again. COVID-19 has also given the opportunity to reflect on the use of technology in the appraisal process, particularly as health care professionals become more comfortable in using the variety of platforms available and the fact that social distancing may preclude face to face conversations.

Prior to the pandemic, Christiane Shrimpton, William Liu and I had started reviewing our course provision both for new and experienced appraisers. This review was put on hold during the pandemic as many of our clinical and non-clinical staff were deployed elsewhere to help with the emerging challenges. Shortly, we will once again start this review process. But this time, we will not only review the content but also the mode of delivery as social distancing measures will be with us for many months to come, and courses will have to be delivered using appropriate virtual media.

I would like to thank the whole appraisal team at NES for the work they do tirelessly in ensuring the system works well for everyone but particularly William and Christiane who have continued to work tirelessly with me in developing our appraiser courses for the future.

Please keep safe and well and thank you for all your hard work during these testing times.

The time has come to write the overview to another Annual Report for Appraisal in Scotland. It is a welcome opportunity to reflect on the many things we have achieved and are planning. It was another year of changes, some of them expected, some of them rather unexpected. Who would have thought at the beginning of the year that we would end the appraisal year in lockdown with revalidation halted by the GMC, appraisal put on hold and most of us grappling with very different ways of working?

First of all, I would like to thank everyone involved in making the appraisal system in Scotland the appreciated national resource it is: Scottish Government and the Revalidation Delivery Board Scotland (RDBS), the NES Appraisal team, Appraisal Leads, Responsible Officers, Appraisers and Appraisal Admin teams in the different Health Boards and the Course Tutors who continue to deliver our National Appraisal Training. All of you are playing such important roles and I appreciate all you are doing to support appraisal in Scotland.

Both the Scottish Medical Education and Appraisers Conferences in May 2019 were an excellent opportunity to give updates and get feedback on the current appraiser training and appraisal system in Scotland. It was clear that both are widely appreciated and respected. It also gave us some feedback on things that would benefit from an update or refresh, now that the appraisal system is much more embedded and we are well into the second revalidation cycle.

The feedback showed us that the appraiser training included excellent elements but was missing others and was no longer fully fit for purpose in the current format and content. We used other opportunities we had during the year to gather more detailed feedback on this. An initial action was the piloting of a session on Recognition of Trainers for appraisers I developed in conjunction with the education team at NHS Lothian. It was very well received, and we are looking at developing this into a session that can be delivered locally in Health Boards as an update for established appraisers. We are also exploring options for using this as a model for other update sessions that could form part of local appraiser peer support and update sessions. Based on the information we have gained from the feedback, we have also started updating the refresher training and are now working on the new appraiser training courses.

Discussions at the appraisal leads meetings and the results of the last MARQA report showed that there are variations in the support for appraisal in primary and secondary care. We ran a survey last year to explore this further and the summary of the results can be found later in this report. This showed that overall, appraisals are seen as positive by most appraisers. It also gave some comments on things that could be improved. One of the areas I had already started looking at is finding a way to focus more on the supportive and developmental aspects of appraisals without losing any of the essentials for revalidation. The current pause in appraisals has given us an opportunity to stand back, reflect and consider how we can do this as we restart the appraisal process. I look forward to working with appraisal leads, appraisers and others on this. I have long been passionate about these aspects of appraisal and strongly believe they are what is most helpful to appraisees.

The last few months have been challenging for all of us and much will look different for the foreseeable future. We are now well versed in video consultations and video meetings and things we would never have believed possible suddenly seem to be working unexpectedly well. While I am sure just like me others are missing the face to face interactions, this pandemic has given us opportunities to rethink what we are doing and how we can do it. These new experiences will feed into our plans for the future and I hope you are just as curious as I am about what the new normal will bring and will join me in shaping some of this future.