Preparing for your first appraisal

The best time to start preparing for it is as soon as a new appraisal year starts. In England, you should choose an electronic portfolio acceptable to your RO and can check this with your regional appraisal team, who assign you and contact you with your appraiser and appraisal month. In Scotland, you will be provided with the Scottish online appraisal resource (SOAR) to use. In Wales, you’ll need to use the Medical Appraisal Revalidation System (MARS). In Northern Ireland, use the GP appraisal registration and declaration form.

For your first appraisal post-CCT, your appraiser can expect you to provide them with reflection on the aims and achievements that you had for your final ARCP (Annual Review of Competence Progression), and this is the PDP that should be brought forward to your first medical appraisal for revalidation.

You can ask for your post-CCT personal development plan, which you discussed with your trainer, to be emailed to you at your final educational supervisor's review. If you can't access it, discuss this with your appraiser, who may agree that you can summarise it 'as best remembered', providing this enables your appraiser to confirm that you’ve reviewed, and made progress with, the previous personal development plan.

Appraisers in NHS England confirm the statement "A review that demonstrates appropriate progress against the previous personal development plan has taken place." Alternatively, your appraiser can justify to your responsible officer (RO), disagreeing that statement, which is unlikely to cause a problem for a future revalidation recommendation.

Your portfolio will need to cover all your roles for which you require a license to practise. Some ROs want you to include the names of all the surgeries where you have worked since your last appraisal. Check with your appraiser whether it’s required in your area. If you do sessions in an Urgent Treatment Centre, for an out-of-hours provider, a hospital, medical school or private GP service, it’s helpful to provide the name of your Medical Director or line manager for each.

There are six types of supporting information to collect and reflect on. Adapted from the GMC’s supporting information. 

These are:

• Continuing professional development (CPD)
• Quality improvement activity (QIA)
• Significant events
• Feedback from patients or those to whom you provide medical services
• Feedback from colleagues
• Compliments and complaints

Answering the reflective questions in your portfolio allows you to illustrate these with examples. Do not use AI to answer the reflective questions for you.

Describe what you have done to keep up to date across the whole of your scope of work

Examples could include reading the BJGP, BMJ, and doing eLearning or taking part in coffee time discussions at work and clinical meetings.

What are the two or three most significant things you have learned this year?

Describe how or where you learned them. For example, in practice, in a peer learning group, or from the BJGP. See if you can illustrate this by implementing the learning in practice with a patient, which might become a brief anonymised case-based reflection that you could share with peers or reflect on with your appraiser.

Have you identified any learning needs that you need, or want, to address, or key learning to be shared?

This might be the identification of PUNS (patient unmet needs) and DENS (doctors’ educational needs) in a consultation that you then looked up and read guidance on. We recommend you keep your learning contemporaneously once you have an electronic appraisal portfolio.

Can you illustrate implementing your learning or change in practice by drafting a brief anonymised case-based reflection that you could share with peers or reflect on with your appraiser?

Upload any reflections on specific CPD activities as supporting information.

Every year, you should reflect on any informal feedback you have had from patients, parents or carers. You will only need to complete formal PSQ once per five-year revalidation cycle.

You should reflect on any informal feedback you have had from colleagues and be able to demonstrate how you work effectively with colleagues. As with patient feedback, you'll only need to complete a formal colleague feedback exercise once per revalidation cycle.

You will need to sign a statement declaring that you accept the professional obligations placed upon you by Good medical practice in relation to probity, including the statutory obligation on you to ensure that you have adequate professional indemnity for all your professional roles and the professional obligation on you to manage your interests appropriately. Probity includes your use of social media in accordance with GMC guidance on use of social media.