Everything you do as a doctor leaves a record somewhere. The cases, the procedures, the assessments, the reflections, the projects. Spread across a career that runs for decades and crosses hospitals, deaneries, countries and systems, that record is the closest thing you have to a complete account of your working life. The question worth asking early is a plain one: whose record is it, and will you still have it in twenty years?
Two records, not one
It helps to separate two records that are often treated as one but serve different purposes:
- The programme's assessment of you, held in the ePortfolio your training or your employer requires. It is built around a specific curriculum and owned by the arrangement between the system and a college, deanery or trust. It does its job, and it belongs to that job.
- Your own lifelong clinical record, the continuous account of what you have seen, done, learned and reflected on across your whole career. The only person with a lasting interest in it is you, and no programme is designed to keep it for you.
The value of the second record is easy to underrate until you need it. It is what lets you walk into an interview, an appraisal, a Portfolio Pathway application or a job in another country and show what you have actually done, in full, without depending on a login that expired three rotations ago. A complete record you own is a professional asset. A scattered set of accounts other people kept of you is not the same.
Why the institutional record is tied to the post
None of this is a fault in the systems. An ePortfolio built for training is an assessment environment, not a filing cabinet. Supervisor sign-offs have to stay attributable, curriculum links belong to a specific programme, and the contract behind your account sits between the system and a college, deanery or employer rather than between the system and you. There are sound reasons of assessment integrity and data governance for an institution to control its own environment.
The consequence still lands on you, because the design unit is the programme and your career is longer than any programme. The system's obligations end when the post ends. Your need for the evidence does not.
If you trained in the UK, you already know how many systems a career passes through, and each one is tied to your place in a programme:
- Foundation training runs on Horus in England and Turas (NHS Education for Scotland) elsewhere.
- Physician trainees use the JRCPTB ePortfolio, whose published policy grants non-training doctors access only by annual application and fee, in one-year blocks, and reserves the right to deactivate accounts that are not paid.
- Surgeons use eLogbook, run by the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, which withdrew its app in October 2024, leaving cases on expired subscriptions to be copied across by hand.
- Onefile, used for apprenticeships and training, states that a learner portfolio cannot be transferred between centres and must be rebuilt at the new one.
While some personal appraisal portfolios are owned by the doctor by subscription, on the whole these institutional systems are built for the programmes they serve. Your career simply outlasts any one of them, and that is the whole case for keeping a record of your own.
The limitations of exporting portfolios, and how we hope to solve them
It would be easy to assume the answer is a system that lets you move a live portfolio from one place to the next. No such thing currently exists, and that includes ours. An export from any ePortfolio is a record of a portfolio, not a portfolio you can pour into the next system and carry on with. The content travels: the forms, the dates, the names, the reflections, the attachments. The working structure does not: the curriculum links, the sign-off chains, the relationship between an entry and the assessment that validates it. A receiving system takes another system's export as an attachment or a set of documents to re-enter, not as a living record. This is inherent to how assessment environments work.
The problem Alessia is tackling
Solving ePortfolio portability is actively on our minds at Alessia. We are looking at ways to help doctors rebuild a portfolio automatically from an old export rather than retyping it in by hand. In the age of AI this should not be hard, and it sits on our roadmap as one of the real, everyday frustrations doctors live with across the profession, a problem we take seriously. Doctors are asking for the same thing from the other direction:
"We should be pushing for / expecting colleges to adopt OPEN STANDARDS for maintaining portfolios."
— u/rmacd, r/doctorsUK, June 2026
That is exactly what we recognise, and it is what we are working towards.
In the meantime, export to preserve
In the absence of that tooling today, the rule stays simple: you are not exporting to continue, you are exporting to preserve, and continuity has to come from a record you keep yourself. Before your access changes, work through this quick list:
- Export while your login works, not in your first week at the new place.
- Take the fullest export each system offers: per-post and per-year PDFs, the complete download where one exists, plus every attachment you originally uploaded.
- Keep original certificates, feedback forms and completion documents outside any institutional system.
- Record assessor names, roles and dates for anything you may later cite in an appraisal, an interview or a Portfolio Pathway application.
- Capture summary and progress views as screenshots or PDFs, since some systems' own transfer processes rely on them.
- Put a date in your diary before your last day in post, and treat the export as part of leaving.
Alessia, your lifelong portfolio record
We would rather help you get ahead of these challenges than watch you reconstruct a portfolio under deadline. So while you are still in post, a few questions worth sitting with:
- If your current login stopped working tomorrow, which pieces of evidence could you no longer produce?
- Which of your assessments exist only inside a system whose access depends on a post you are about to leave?
- Do you have one continuous record of your career that you own, or only the separate accounts each programme kept of you?
- What date, before your last day in a post, is your next export booked for?
Remember that Alessia is built to be the record that outlasts every post: one continuous, lifelong portfolio that belongs to you, so that when access to an institutional system ends, your own account of your career does not. You capture your work once, in a place that does not expire with your contract, and produce the specific export an institution asks for while the underlying record stays yours across every move. If you are building that record from the start, our guide to what goes in your portfolio is the place to begin.
Think about what a complete record of your working life is worth twenty or thirty years in: every case, every procedure, every reflection, in one place you own and can stand behind. No single post is built to give you that. You build it, deliberately, by keeping your own record alongside whatever system your programme requires. Start early, keep it yours, and the portfolio becomes a record to be proud of rather than one to reconstruct under deadline.
Sources
- Onefile Help Centre, Move learners from one centre to another? (modified 17 February 2026)
- eLogbook (Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh), eLogbook App Withdrawal
- JRCPTB, Policy guidance for non-training doctor's access to ePortfolio (updated May 2018)
- The Federation of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of the UK, How do I download my ePortfolio?
- UK Foundation Programme, e-portfolio (Horus and Turas)
- r/doctorsUK, "Any affected doctor please sign" (June 2026)
