For Domain 2, a Quality Improvement Activity is required once in a 5-year revalidation cycle and a Review of Significant Events is required for every appraisal.
You are required to provide details of a Quality Improvement Activity (QIA) once in a 5-year revalidation cycle.
Additionally, multi-source feedback (MSF) and patient survey questionnaires (PSQ) are also considered examples of QIA, which are both required once in a 5-year revalidation cycle (though not necessary in the same appraisal year).
Examples of this include:
Audit as a sessional doctor is often harder because you may need to undertake all the design, data collection and analysis yourself. Topics are more limited because you may not have access to the same group of patients to do a second audit cycle.
However, you may be in a longer term locum - or be able to choose a topic that involves immediately necessary care - and the templates in the main toolkit will be suitable.
Also remember that you need to be one of the doctors involved in the activity being audited, but not necessarily to perform the data collection or analysis - as long as you can learn and have the potential to change what you do.
Also consider:
As a sessional doctor you probably won't have a cipher number. It may still be possible to be involved in practice-based prescribing work, however. For example:
If you undertake any OOH work, you will find additional worked examples to cover prescribing, audit and referals in the OOH toolkit.
As a sessional doctor you will usually be able to review the quality of your referral letters, and the templates for review of content and efficiency of letters will be of some help. The increasing use of electronic referral may reduce the value of reviewing some aspects of the contents template.
You may find it more difficult to review the effectiveness of your referrals. You will need to get access to the patient records possibly three months or more after the referral has taken place - it is worth discussing this with the employing practice at the time to make sure this will be possible.
Also consider:
You are asked to provide an average of two accounts of SEA annually over the five year cycle.
The SEA process is a method of reflective learning which can be used to analyse incidents where patients are unintentionally harmed - or could have been - as part of the care process. The SEA process can also be used to analyse examples of high quality care.
Ideally SEA meetings should involve all those who had a role in the event. If at all possible you should ask any practice where you have worked whether you can attend their SEA meeting if there has been an event that involves you.
If this is not possible, an alternative would be to discuss the event with a group of your peers - for example a small study group. Although this may still be valuable, it runs the risk of missing vital information from some of the others involved in the event.
If you are not able to take part in a small study group, you could still write up an event of personal significance, present it as a reflective study, and discuss it with your appraiser.
This really DOES require working with somebody else, but if all else fails you might use a case report proforma.
This is an important part of any doctor's work, and the Child Protection section in the main toolkit encourages you to ensure your training is up to date and to reflect on any child protection cases that you come across. You could write up an anonymised discussion on one of these as a case review, but clearly you will need input from the practice team members involved.
This page was last updated on: 06/01/2023
