Building a Portfolio
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Templates for use in a Portfolio or Personal Development Plan (PDP)
The following templates can be downloaded and used as a starting point for your Educational Portfolio or Personal Development Plan (PDP).
These have been developed from the author's own and others experience as GP Trainers, and some have been developed from Professional Development : A Guide for General Practice (The Wessex Way) by R. While and M. Attwood.
Some of these forms have also been incorporated into the Swindon Trainer’s toolkit.
The advantage of developing your PDP in an electronic format is that it can easily be updated and saved and becomes a more dynamic and useful document, rather than having numerous sheets of paper which are never looked at, rarely updated and serve only to provide evidence to meet some requirement or other. This list of forms is by no means exclusive and you may want to develop your own or adapt the ones that are shown below.
The background to PDPs can be found here.
The evidence-base for portfolios and PDPs is reviewed here.
Available Documents
1. SCOT Analysis.
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A good starting point allowing you to outline your aims and objectives and identify your strengths, weaknesses, challenges and threats.
2. Self-Audit.
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An analysis of your personal support, what motivates you and how you deal with stress.
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This allows reflection on courses and learning events that you have attended during your career that made an impression on you.
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This is a summary of the positions or roles that you have held that helped develop particular areas of knowledge, skills or professional values e.g. developing practice protocols, organising colleagues, group leader, PCT lead or member of a working group.
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Reflection on the learning event, documenting key learning points and how you are going to apply this to your every day practice. There is a full version based on the Wessex Way and an abbreviated one for simpler use.
6. Educational Plan and Educational Needs
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Use one of these two useful documents as the basis of your educational plan during your GP registrar year to create a list of educational needs that can be regularly updated.
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A way of identifying educational needs from awkward clinical encounters.
8. Admissions.
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Recording the provisional diagnosis and comparing with the actual diagnosis can provide useful educational opportunities. This form helps document this.
9. Referrals.
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Keeping a list of referrals and reviewing them when the letter returns from out-patients is a useful learning exercise. This form helps document this.
10. PUNS and DENS.
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A document to help analyse Patients’ Unmet Needs and transcribing them into Doctors’ Educational Needs. Adapted from Dr Richard Eve, GP Taunton.
11. Log of Educational Activity.
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This documents what learning activity you have been involved in and is useful during your registrar year e.g. a list of tutorials, teaching by other members of the PHCT.
12. Continuing Medical education.
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This is a summary of ongoing educational activity. It is perhaps more suited to educational activity occurring outside the practice or once you have completed your GPR year
13. Personal Development Plan Action Summary Page.
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This is the summary of your main educational aims and objectives and the progress you have made. It provides a useful summary for your mentor or appraisor to view.
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It is useful for your trainer or teacher to have an evaluation of their teaching after a teaching event or tutorial. This form provides the structure for that feedback.
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This form allows documentation of significant events and how they can be used an educational tool and to facilitate change. This has been adapted from The University of Manchester and the Medical Protection Society’s workshop on significant event audit.
Portfolio guide written by: Mark Dinwoodie
Last updated: 01 October 2006