Education and Training

New workplace based assessments for Specialty Registrars in Occupational Medicine

How much time will they take? When should they be done?

In general, each WBA should take no more than 30 minutes to conduct, including feedback to the trainee and the completion of the forms.

The table below records how often WBAs should be done during each year of training and by whom, as a minimum lower limit. More assessments may be appropriate where difficulties are identified. Additional formative assessments are in any case encouraged (from the trainee’s viewpoint sampling a number of different assessors is advantageous); and for such additional WBAs, trainees can approach a variety of assessors, including other consultants and peers. A few tools even lend themselves to self-completion to support reflective learning.

	Who (times/year)?
What?	Clinical Supervisor	External Assessor a	Educational Supervisor b
Mini-CEX	4
CBD	8	2
DOPS	4
MSF	1		1
SAIL (OH)	4	2
Logbook	At least quarterly	Annually	At least quarterly

a – The Faculty will appoint external assessors in WBAs who will conduct around 3 kinds of WBAs per year (the details are still being finalised). Their scores will feed into the ARCP, but will also be used to assist in the evaluation and refinement of the tools.
b – If different from the clinical supervisor

The process is generally ‘trainee led’ – i.e. the onus is on the trainee to organise each WBA with an assessor, and to ensure the paperwork gets completed and the minimum target number of assessments are done for each year of training. The educational supervisor will help the trainee to select a range of relevant material across the breadth of the training syllabus, suitable to the training needs.