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Every year, anaesthetists in training (AiTs) undergo an Annual Review of Competency Progression (ARCP). ARCPs are a legal requirement and ensure that doctors are providing safe and high-quality patient care. They are used to assess progression against curriculum standards and provide evidence for General Medical Council (GMC) revalidation that happens every five years.

For AiTs, the ARCP panel reviews evidence submitted as part of the Educational Supervisors Structured Report (ESSR) on the Lifelong Learning Platform (LLP). The ESSR contains 16 sections and is the only thing visible to the ARCP panel, so it needs to be complete with all information required to ‘pass’ the ARCP!

Fortunately, the College has produced an in-depth checklist that outlines the requirements for a successful ARCP. This document clearly states what is required in each of the 16 sections for an Outcome 1 at ARCP. The ESSR itself must be created on the LLP after submission of all the prerequisite forms for all forms to pull through.

In anaesthesia they have been present for the last 10 years but have become more prevalent in the last four years. Many factors have led to this increase, but one of the biggest is the rise in the number of IMGs as new registrants on the GMC register. These totalled 40% of all new registrants in the last year.¹ Other factors include training bottlenecks that have appeared as an unintended consequence of the changes from the 2010 curriculum.

This has led to increased competition for available posts, with significant numbers of doctors sitting in Locally Employed Doctor or Medical Training Initiative posts accumulating competencies that can count towards CESR. Understandably, trusts that can offer all the components of the curriculum in-house have recognised the potential to have a consistently high-quality, in-house workforce, with an ability to fill their own rotas when gaps appear. This is aided by the Lifelong Learning Platform being freely available to all members of the College, enabling training gaps to be easily identified and targeted with in-house training programmes.

Read the latest letters submitted by members in April's Digital Bulletin.

Author: Dr Richard Knight, Retired Anaesthetist, archives@rcoa.ac.uk

In April 1982, I was grinding through a locum session in a Swedish regional hospital when my wife telephoned me to tell me that the duty officer in my UK medical unit has asked her to say a single word to me – the super-secret word designating the necessity to report immediately to the unit. 

This was my initiation into Mrs Thatcher's plan to recapture the Falkland Islands.

Most men in the unit knew where Argentina could be found in an atlas, mainly because of the forthcoming football tournament starring Maradona. This had not been the situation when Dr David Owen as Foreign Secretary, had put the unit on stand-by to repel invading Guatemalans from entering British Honduras. Then, the staff sergeant was compelled to send his wife to the NAAFI to buy an atlas.

After days of packing and repacking equipment, the unit was trucked to Southampton to join 2 Para on board a North Sea car ferry. Cabins were allocated, in the best military tradition, by rank, but in reality were all the same tiered bunks. The major in the overhead bunk was to read and reread his copy of Herodotus, in Greek.

The College is moving forward at pace as we work to implement improvements to our member services and benefits. On the staff team we are all too aware of the challenges you are facing at work, and our goal is to meet your professional needs and to support you in delivering safe and effective patient-centred care.

In her President’s View, Dr Fiona Donald outlines our programme of development for exams, including how we will give anaesthetists in training a greater role in our assessment processes. This has been a major priority for us over the last 18 months as we have sought to investigate how we can make improvements across all aspects of our exams. To help us deliver these improvements we are increasing capacity within our exams team. This additional expertise will enable careful implementation of longer-term changes alongside the regular face-to-face and online delivery of our exams.