Common pitfalls at ARCP/PYA and how to avoid them

There were some queries arising from the latest round of ARCPs regarding required competencies and sign off for procedures in GIM. Please see the following information from Dr Bhowmik for clarification:

• The acute take logbook is to confirm that you have seen a minimum of 1000 acute medical patients in your training. You can use the cases in the logbook as evidence for various aspects of the GIM curriculum e.g headache, paralysis, abdo pain etc. Therefore, you should keep this logbook. There are no rules as to exactly how you should structure it but people have been expected to present anonymised information for all the 1000 medical take patients. A date, the condition that the patient had and a note about any challenges or learning points would be recommended. Make sure you don’t have patient-identifiable data on anything you save to USBs or upload to your ePortfolio.
• ACATs are focused on showing your ability to run an acute medical take (or possibly an ITU/HDU take). You should complete 6 per year of GIM.
• Re: GIM CPD – as far as I am aware 15 hours of online CPD may be used to count towards the total of 100 hours.
• In relation to procedures such as knee aspiration, evidence from Core training is considered too remote for the purposes of your StR ARCP and PYA. I would strongly suggest you find a friendly Rheumatology StR (they often have elective lists for knee aspiration) and get signed off during your StR training.
• You should also have a record of 186 non-specialist-Respiratory clinics undertaken during the whole training period (I do not know the calculation behind this number). For most, this will not be difficult at all. People have not at present been asked to present anonymised information of all the patients seen in these clinics so a log with dates and numbers of new and follow-up patients seen would be acceptable. ‘Non-specialist’ means general Respiratory (ie not Professor X’s super-sub-specialised clinic).

If anyone has further queries please do not hesitate to contact one of the trainee reps: Alex, Zaheer or LJ.