(13) MARQA data | Medical Appraisal Scotland

Administration Teams Health board admin teams (1) (13) MARQA data

Prescribed Search function

All designated bodies in Scotland are expected to compile appraisal and revalidation records for the purposes of the annual MARQA (Medical Appraisal and Revalidation Quality Assurance) review, for example how many appraisees did you have connected to you on 31st March? How many of them were eligible for appraisal? How many of them were appraised? How many were due revalidated? etc

For those organisations who use SOAR to manage their appraisals, we have created a function called "Prescribed Search" which will list all those who had an appraisee role with your organisation (ergo with a prescribed connection) and their full appraisal history on SOAR. You can then export the results into a spreadsheet for further analysis.

Below guidance shows how this function works and how you can use the exported results (same is applicable in other search pages on SOAR).

Accessing the Prescribed Search function

Click on "Interviews" from the menu
Click on "Prescribed search" tab along the top
Set the search parameters:
- Change the year in "Connection on" (but keep 31/03)
- Set "Period" to the year in review (typically the year just past e.g. if you set the Connection on to 31/03/2025, then the "period" you want to review is 2024/25)
Click "Search"
When the results load, click the "Export To Report" button

Working with exported results in Excel

Once you have exported the results (in .csv format), open this in Excel. The data might need a bit of cleaning up to start with (if data has been maintained throughout the year this should ease your workload).

Open the exported .csv file in Excel
Delete the first three rows (it's just info on when the spreadsheet was downloaded)
Click in one of the cells that has content in it and format the data as a table (so you can sort and filter the results much easier later)
- Either use the "home" tab in the ribbon at the top and click on "Format as Table" button and select a colour of your choice; or
- Hold down the "Control" key on the keyboard and press "T" (make sure to tick the box "My table has headers" in the popup box)
You might have some columns showing ###### in the results, it just means the column width needs extended - try this to auto extend all columns' width:
- Click on the top left corner blank box above row 1 and to the left of column A (this selects all cells in the spreadsheet)
- Carefully hover the mouse cursor to the dividing line between any two columns, you will notice the cursor changing to one that has arrows pointing left and right - double click (this should automatically set all columns to maximum width according to the content of the cells)
Save the spreadsheet in Excel file to avoid losing the formatting (File > Save As > File type)

The data will need sense-checked by yourselves - especially if you have dental colleagues or dummy accounts in your records (or you might find that some of the columns might be off if you used , or - or () in title or name fields).

Sort by Appraisee GMC number (from Z to A)
Select the rows of entries that are not applicable for MARQA (e.g. dentists whose "GMC" numbers should be prefixed with GDC, or test dummy accounts who "GMC" should be prefixed with initials)
Right-click on the selection and Delete

When the data is cleaned up, you can start to work on setting the filters in the relevant columns. Before we do that though, let's go through some of the results you might see so you can get an understanding of what they mean when you filter them.

Example of an incomplete/in-progress appraisal where column L (Interview Status) is showing as "In_progress". Depending on when the appraisal took place and the personal circumstances, you may wish to chase this up and get it completed before running the report again prior to the MARQA submission.
Example of a manually completed appraisal, where column L (Interview Status) is showing as "Completed" and column M (Form 4 status) is not completed. This does not impact the MARQA counts but good for your info if you wanted to see how many appraisals were manually completed in a given period.
Example of a completed appraisal on SOAR that was carried out in a different health board (column K). It is not uncommon for an appraisee to transfer health boards and sometimes they may have completed an appraisal prior to leaving their last board. Because this appraisee has a prescribed connection to your board on 31st March, their appraisal will count in your tally because it was carried out in the appraisal period in question.
Example of a completed Form 5A exemption from appraisal where column N (Form 5A status) is showing as "Completed".
Example of a completed appraisal (via Form 4) where columns L and M are showing as "Completed).

Filtering exported results in Excel

To get the numbers needed for questions like "How many doctors in your health board with a prescribed connection was appraised in year XX/YY?" you will need to filter the table columns in Excel.

The questions may differ with each review, but it's reasonable to assume you will be asked the following questions as standard:

In the year being reviewed (split by primary and secondary care):

How many doctors with a prescribed connection to your organisation do you have?
How many of them are eligible to have an appraisal?
How many of them were appraised? (split by doctor roles*, e.g. GP principle, Locum, Consultant, SAS, Clinical Fellow etc)

The total number of doctors with a prescribed connection to you will be the total number of results (rows) in your spreadsheet.

In terms of eligibility, you will need to check this manually against local records but if you filtered the Fiscal Year column (I) and select "N/A" - this are the ones who did not get appraised in the selected appraisal year (they might have an appraisal scheduled for the following year but you will need to check this on SOAR).

If you reset the filter for column I and column N for "Completed" Form 5A, then this list will give you the number of doctors with a signed off Form 5A.

You can check for the total number of filtered results via the status bar near bottom left of your workbook.

If you see any gaps in column F (Appraisee Role), it means the information has not been added to SOAR. You can manually update this on the spreadsheet but make sure to update SOAR as well (otherwise the data on SOAR will always be wrong).

To get the number of completed appraisals for different doctor groups, set column L (Interview status) to "Completed", and then set the filter in column F (Appraisee Role) to select the different groups. You will find the numbers in bottom left of workbook.

This navigating of the spreadsheet will take a bit of getting used to but if you need any assistance please do not hesitate to get in touch with the team.

* User roles on SOAR

The different doctor roles a user has (GP principle, Locum, Consultant, SAS, Clinical Fellow etc) are manually maintained by health board admin teams, they are not linked to any systems so this does not get auto populated on SOAR, someone in the local team needs to update this as and when they change.

Revalidation Data

Whilst SOAR is linked to GMC Connect, the information we received from this is a user's next revalidation due date. We do not receive any other revalidation information on SOAR.

So unless your RO (Responsible Officer) uses SOAR to make revalidation recommendations (most just do this directly on GMC Connect), you are best to use local records to answer the questions re revalidation on MARQA or through GMC Connect directly.

We appreciate that locally you will maintain records which are more accurate than what we have on SOAR. The Prescribed Search function is intended as a tool to help you cross-check your area's data (rather than being the gospel truth).

Should you have any queries or issues with this or if the results don't make sense to you, please get in touch with a member of the team.

This page was last updated on: 08/08/2025