Faculty Appraisals

An update on Faculty Appraisals from Dr David Pugh, Suitable Person & Chair of FSEM UK’s Appraisal & Revalidation Committee. Some of you may already have had your appraisals prior to lockdown or have been deferred by your own organisation till 2021, but we believe this update will still be relevant to you.

While we want to maintain the quality and integrity of Faculty Appraisals, it is important that we recognise that many of our colleagues have faced difficult challenges in their professional and personal lives and therefore we need to reflect on this and view your upcoming appraisals in light of these changes.

The main areas of change will be in the following domains:

• Job plan
• PDP and CPD
• Planning new PDP

One of the other key areas we can add value is in supporting you during these challenging times. Although our role is as appraisers I believe that we can also offer a supporting and caring role in helping you to reflect on your current challenges.

In this regard I see a change to how we can support you in the domains mentioned:

• Job planning- it is key to accept that plans will have changed and to note these changes in the appraisal and allow you to reflect on how and why the changes have occurred and to reflect on how the changes have affected you.
• PDP & CPD- it is key in these areas to be aware that you will have reduced your overall CPD and that you are likely to have not completed or in some cases started your PDPs for this year. The plans not started can be carried over or scrapped depending on personal circumstances. Covid-19 learning can be incorporated into your CPD but to my mind does not require huge amounts of input from you. The main way forward for me is to document reflection on a few areas and make these the mainstay of the learning for the last appraisal period.
• New PDP- as previously stated this can simply be a continuation of last year’s PDP with additional timelines or this can be scrapped and replaced with completely new PDP or a combination of both.

Supporting you as our colleagues can be easily documented in the appraisal process by recognising your issues whether these are related to physical or mental health and recognising the alterations to your jobs and to your PDP & CPD.

I am keen not to make this too complicated. We are not letting people off with poor quality appraisals but I hope we are going to challenge you by improving reflective practice, recognising and supporting challenges you face and helping you to recognise the effects this pandemic has had on your own health and welfare and recording this in the appraisal.

I hope this all makes some sense and that we will all continue to offer the best appraisal service that the FSEM UK can offer which is very likely to involve even more TEAMS, ZOOM or other platforms to avoid face to face contact when not necessary. I am sure we have all become more practised in utilising this technology in recent months.

Best wishes to all and please feel free to contact the Faculty office if you have any queries.