Quality management
A key responsibility of our 8 Specialty Quality Management Groups (sQMGs) is to monitor and respond to the data, information and intelligence relating to the quality of postgraduate training in their specialties. This includes the running of their specialties’ QRPs.
QRPs are held at the beginning of our quality cycle each year. The usual membership of the sQMG participates in the QRP. Representatives from relevant Royal Colleges and from the Director of Medical Education group are also invited.
Our Postgraduate QRPs consider all the data, information and intelligence for the training year that has just ended about the training in the specialties covered by that sQMG across Scotland. The purpose of the QRP is to decide what actions are needed to ensure standards are being met and to improve the quality of training. The information considered during QRPs, that is also used by sQMGs throughout the year to monitor the quality of education and training, includes:
Training programme director (TPD) report from NES on Vimeo.
The Medical Schools run an undergraduate QRP that considers all the available data, information and intelligence for the academic teaching year that has just ended relating to undergraduate medical teaching in all relevant units across Scotland. The undergraduate QRP also has access to the NTS and STS results for postgraduate training. Its purpose is to decide what actions are necessary to improve the quality of undergraduate teaching. The output of the undergraduate QRP informs decisions made at specialty QRPs.
The Foundation QRP and GP/OM/PH QRP decisions also inform the specialty QRPs. In specialties where Core training programmes exist these will be considered first during the QRP and will then inform higher specialty discussions. As an illustration, the QRP for Higher Medical Training (for those specialties that provide dual training including general internal medicine) considers all the outputs of the undergraduate QRP, the Foundation QRP, the GP/OM/PH QRP and the core medical training QRP as well as the information relating to training in higher general internal medicine.
The decisions from QRPs include:
These activities inform the sQMG’s understanding of the quality of training that is provided at a site or in a programme. The QRPs also identify sites where there are multiple signals of potential good practice and issue letters commending the quality of training to the trainers, DMEs and TPDs who are associated with the relevant units. Full details of how QRPs are conducted is provided through the QRP standard operating procedure. This document also contains details of our decision aid tool which is used to assign a red/amber/green (RAG) rating to each site and specialty based on the available evidence (or where there is lack of evidence). The decision aid was introduced to support standardisation of decision making among the different QRPs and sQMGs.
This page was last updated on: 23.06.2021 at 12.57