Revalidation pilots will target hard to reach groups of doctors

The NHS Revalidation Support Team is to lead a series of revalidation pilots in England this autumn that will target doctors who don’t fall within the traditional clinical governance systems, such as locums and doctors who work in private practice.

The pilots will test the draft Medical Appraisal Guide (MAG)—which outlines the essential components of the appraisal process in relation to revalidation—and provide information on how revalidation will fit within existing organisational systems and processes.

“The focus of this year’s pilots is testing the MAG on groups of doctors we’ve already worked with but also testing it on a wider variety of doctors,” said Nick Lyons, programme director of testing and piloting for the support team. “So as well as mainstream NHS doctors there’s quite a lot of emphasis on locum doctors, both in primary and secondary care; SAS [staff and associate specialist] doctors; doctors working in the private sector; and those working in other less well supported clinical governance structures.”

The pilots will recruit between 100 and 200 GPs in the NHS Leicester City region; at least 100 consultants and SAS grade doctors in Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust; at least 400 doctors in primary and secondary care in the London strategic health authority area; and more than 50 SAS and trust grade doctors in West Suffolk Hospitals NHS Trust.

The Independent Health Advisory Services, a trade body for the independent healthcare sector, will lead pilots involving a minimum of 100 doctors who work almost exclusively outside the NHS—such as private GPs, medicolegal doctors, football club doctors, and benefit agency doctors—and the Medacs Healthcare locum agency will run pilots involving at least 100 primary and secondary care locums in Greater London and Greater Manchester.

Participants who are invited to take part in the pilots, which will take place from October to December, will be asked to bring supporting information to their annual appraisal and afterwards to provide detailed feedback on the MAG and the appraisal process.

However, taking part in the pilots shouldn’t involve any extra work for doctors, said Dr Lyons. “The preliminary feedback from most of the doctors I’ve spoken to is that what they’re being asked to do is quite ‘doable’ and the supporting information they’re being asked to produce is less than they feared,” he said. “They will need to organise [the information] in a slightly different way, but those doctors in the best run appraisal systems will probably find they don’t have to provide any more supporting information than they do presently.”

• Download the draft Medical Appraisal Guide and read more about the pilots at www.revalidationsupport.co.uk.