Procedural Skills Checklist

Dear All,

Welcome to the second issue of Tips on TREAT. This is going to be a regular e-mail highlighting a single assessment tool on TREAT each issue. As you may remember, TREAT, is the Wentwest Trainer-Registrar Education Assessment Toolkit, and can be found here: www.wentwest.com/treat

I intend sending out an e-mail like this regularly. Feel free to send me feedback, or to let me know if you don’t want to receive the e-mails any more. Similarly, send these on to others if you think they might be interested. You’ll find these e-mails archived on http://www.tipsontreat.blogspot.com/. So far there’s last week’s Tip on the Medical Record Review, and soon this will appear there too.

The tool for today is the Procedural Skills Checklist, which can be found here: http://www.wentwest.com/treat/index_files/Page770.htm

This checklist has been knocking around the college training program for a long time now, and it’s still available in the Companion to the RACGP curriculum. This version is taken from the GPET Assessment During Training document, and is a (quite long) list of all the procedural skills required of a GP. The definition of procedural is quite broad however, as it includes things such as interpretation of an ECG or spirometry, as well as simple and more complicated procedures.

The idea is that the registrar assesses themselves for each skill as either Competent (C), Not Competent, (N) or Not Sure (?). The supervisor or any other qualified person can then teach the required skills and assess the registrar. Once the registrar is Competent and Assessed, they can be ticked off (in the sense of completing it, rather than in the sense of being a bit cross).

It might be reassuring to note that this tool should be used over a long period of time! It would be best to print it off early in a Basic term and ask the registrars to keep it with them throughout their training.

What next? You could ask your registrar if they are aware of the checklist. Pencil in a time to discuss procedural skills they want to learn while with you (using the Term Planner Andrew sent out, perhaps). Let the other doctors know in the practice to call the registrar through if they are doing a procedure (especially early in the term, when the registrar might not have so many patients).

Remember, this is not compulsory. And do feel free to e-mail feedback about the tool or the website, or any suggestions or questions, or if you’d rather not receive the e-mails.