Ask a room of trainees about the ARCP and you tend to hear two things. There is the scramble: the portfolio still half empty as the deadline comes into view, the assessments you meant to space out landing all at once. And there is a weariness with the process itself, a sense that it can feel like a box-ticking exercise with only so much to say about whether you are a good doctor. After a hard year, both are understandable.
Neither feeling is much help the week before a deadline, and being told you should have started sooner helps even less. What helps is understanding what the review is, what it is there to do, and how to get in front of it. Underneath the paperwork it is a serious process with a clear purpose: it is how the profession confirms you are progressing safely and are ready for the next stage, and how you stay revalidated with the GMC along the way. How you experience the process can vary a good deal from one deanery and one panel to the next; the purpose of the process, however, does not.
What the panel reviews
A standard ARCP is a review of documents, not an interview. A panel reads what you have submitted, judges it against your curriculum, and sends you the outcome. Two things sit in front of them:
- Your ePortfolio - everything you have logged and uploaded across the year, whether you are on Horus, Kaizen, Turas or another mandated portfolio system: your workplace-based assessments and supervised learning events, your curriculum links, your Form R or SOAR declarations, and your absence record.
- Your educational supervisor's report - the structured summary your supervisor writes with you at the end of the year, drawing on that same evidence and on your meetings across it.
The relationship between these two sets of documentation is key: your supervisor writes from the evidence you kept, so a thin portfolio does not only weaken the first document, it leaves your supervisor little to build the second one from.
The panel works from what you submitted, to confirm your evidence demonstrates the capabilities your stage requires. That is the part trainees find frustrating, because doing the work well and evidencing it well are not the same skill:
"the ARCP panel are clearly frustrated that I'm deemed competent at work but not at evidencing it reliably"
— u/saltwatersunsets, r/doctorsUK, February 2026
The review can only credit what is recorded. Maddening, but true.
The upside is that there is nothing to rehearse. Because it is a review of documents, there is no viva to prepare for and no performance to give on the day. For a standard review you are not present at all - the outcome reaches you afterwards, usually by email. If the panel flags something to work on, you are invited to a meeting to talk it through and agree your objectives.
The version of you the panel meets was built over the year, entry by entry, so the work that decides the outcome is already done, or it is not, by the time the panel sits.
The evidence deadline is what matters
The date that shapes your year is not the panel date but the evidence deadline before it.
- Nationally, your portfolio has to be available at least two weeks before the panel meets.
- After that it is fixed for this year's decision: evidence added later, however good, was not in front of the panel.
- Your educational supervisor's report has to be in by then too, and that depends on your supervisor's diary as much as your own.
So the deadline, not the panel, is what you are working towards.
Reach it with gaps and the usual result is a holding outcome, Outcome 5. It is not a judgement on your ability: the panel cannot make a decision yet, so it parks one and gives you a short window to supply what is missing. It is common, and routinely sorted out:
"I got outcome 5 in FY1, FY2, CT1, CT2, ST4, my OOP year and ST5. It did not hold me back in training by a single minute and I am now happily CCTed"
— u/FailingCrab, r/doctorsUK, June 2025
Outcome 5 is only one of several outcomes, from a straightforward Outcome 1 to the ones that cause more worry, and most are far less serious than they feel at the time.
Where revalidation fits
The ARCP is doing a second job alongside tracking your progression: it is how you stay revalidated with the GMC while you are in training. The timing confuses people, because the ARCP is annual and revalidation runs on a five-year cycle. It fits together simply.
- You have an ARCP every year.
- The annual reviews are the building blocks to the five-yearly recommendation.
- When you are eligible for your CCT (if your training runs under five years), or at the five-year mark and again at CCT if it runs longer, your responsible officer, usually your postgraduate dean, makes a single revalidation recommendation to the GMC based on those annual reviews.
The declarations on your Form R or SOAR, covering your scope of work, your health, your probity and any significant events, are the revalidation part of the paperwork.
How to be ready
With a new training year starting and most panels months away, this is the point where getting ahead is easiest. The portfolio that reads well at your next review is the one where the evidence built up as the work happened, so the supervisor's report is a summary of a strong year rather than a rescue of a thin one. How to record clinical work so it stands up, and how to keep that going through a busy rota, is the subject of our portfolio fundamentals guides.
A few things sit outside those guides because they belong to the review itself. Line these up early:
- Your Form R or SOAR declarations, complete and covering your full scope of work.
- Your absence record, accurate to the day.
- Your educational supervisor's report, booked and written in good time, which means securing your supervisor's diary well before the deadline.
None of these is clinical work, and any one of them can hold up an otherwise complete portfolio. Aside from these records, there are two questions that are worth some thought:
- If the panel met on your evidence today, what would it be unable to credit?
- What on your ARCP jobs list depends on someone else's diary before your deadline?
Alessia features that ease ARCP prep
Alessia already does a lot of the heavy lifting for ARCP prep, but we have some more fantastic capabilities on our roadmap.
Today Alessia helps you:
- Log your work as it happens across the full breadth of clinical practice, so you carry one continuous record of your clinical year.
- See the shape of what you have recorded in Insights, so you can spot where you are falling behind while there is still time to act.
- Set recurring Goals, a reflection a month or a running CPD total, and watch them build through the year instead of arriving as a wall of catching-up.
- Turn it into submissible evidence with Reports, ready to hand your educational supervisor.
Soon we will be launching:
- Supervisor loops that send your entries and reports to your educational supervisor directly, so their report is built on evidence they have already seen.
- Scheduled tasks, reminders and nudges to keep the weeks before your deadline on track.
The aim is simple: a review-ready portfolio that was never allowed to fall behind.
Sources
- COPMeD, Gold Guide 10th edition (August 2024)
- Scotland Deanery, ARCP FAQs, introduction to your ARCP
- Scotland Deanery, ARCP FAQs, preparing for your ARCP
- GMC, Revalidation requirements for doctors in training
- GMC, Recommendations for doctors in training
- r/doctorsUK, "ADHD coaches with a medical background/familiar with training demands" (February 2026)
- r/doctorsUK, "Outcome 5 on ARCP" (June 2025)
