With the new UK training year starting, this is the point in the cycle where one habit pays back across the next twelve months: planning your workplace-based assessments across the year instead of gathering them in the fortnight before your review. Two factors decide whether that evidence is any good: when each assessment was done, and whether the set of them captures different aspects of your practice rather than the same aspect repeatedly.
The assessment tools are common across UK training; the exact forms vary between hospitals, specialty training boards and ePortfolio systems. What separates a portfolio that reads like a year of practice from one assembled under deadline is timing and spread, not effort.
Match the assessment to the moment
You already know the toolkit. The skill the deadline hides is spotting the clinical moment each assessment suits and getting someone to do it while that moment is fresh.
- Mini-CEX (mini clinical evaluation exercise). A short, observed snapshot of a real patient encounter, a focused history, examination or management decision, that a senior watches and gives you structured feedback on. Because the assessor has to watch it happen, use it for an encounter with real judgement in it and ask a free senior to observe before you start. The skill is anticipating a suitable case and lining someone up in time, since you cannot mark it after the fact.
- Case based discussion (CbD). A structured conversation after the event, built on your notes, about how you reasoned through a case. Use it for the case where the interesting part happened in your head: uncertainty, escalation calls, competing priorities. Mark the notes the day it happens so the case is still findable weeks later.
- DOPS (direct observation of procedural skills). The procedural counterpart to the mini-CEX, with a rating for how much supervision you needed. Use it for a procedure at the edge of your current independence, while the skill is still developing, because the scale is built to show progression.
- MSF (multi source feedback). A single anonymised exercise that gathers the views of the people around you, seniors, peers and the staff working under you, returned through your supervisor. Start it early in a placement, while the colleagues who have worked with you are still on the rota to respond.
The spread is the point, not the count. Each tool sees something the others cannot: the mini-CEX your practice in the moment, the case based discussion the reasoning behind it, DOPS a procedure becoming independent, and multi source feedback how you work with the team. Six mini-CEXs in one week give a review one kind of evidence six times over. One mini-CEX, one case based discussion and a set of multi source feedback give it three separate views of your practice: what you did, how you reasoned it through, and how you work with the people around you.
Most observed tools now sit under the Supervised Learning Event banner, which shifts the emphasis to the learning value of the encounter rather than the score. That framing is most visible in foundation training, where these run as Supervised Learning Events and the team assessment of behaviour is the foundation form of multi source feedback. One note for anyone who trained abroad: colleges use different names and acronyms for the same underlying assessment, so work from your own specialty's curriculum and its exact terms, because the panel reads your portfolio in that dialect.
Forward planning will save you headaches
The moments worth assessing arrive all year; the deadline arrives once. So the fix is to plan the assessments across the year rather than gather them at the end. A workable rhythm:
- At the start of each placement, get your multi source feedback under way first. It is the one you cannot rescue late, because it needs enough colleagues who have worked with you to respond, at least ten including seniors for a foundation team assessment of behaviour, and once a rotation ends those colleagues have moved on. The guidance says the same. The surgical curriculum (ISCP) states the MSF should be undertaken in the first placement of the training year, timed so the feedback returns before that placement ends; the UK Foundation Programme's team assessment of behaviour guidance expects it within the first placement, to leave time to act on it.
- In the early weeks of each rotation, place one observed assessment, while assessors still have the capacity to watch you properly and you still have months to act on what they say.
- Every month or so, look at what you have and what is missing. Which capability has no witness yet, and which upcoming case could provide one. Book the next assessment against a real upcoming case, rather than leaving it until the weeks before your annual review deadline.
- On the day, capture the case while the detail is still yours. The form survives in the ePortfolio; what evaporates is the context that made the case worth assessing.
A year built this way looks unremarkable from outside: multi source feedback started early, with time to act on what came back, observed assessments spread across settings and assessors, case based discussions on the cases that stretched you, each one linked to the capability it evidences with a line on why it mattered.
Solving supervisor friction
None of this is hard in principle. What makes it hard in practice is not just being organised, but getting hold of a supervisor and getting the form signed off. The chase is a genuine grievance:
"I'm almost 40 and having to beg people to fill out forms is embarrassing, especially when you have already reminded them."
— u/Common-Rain9224, r/doctorsUK, July 2026
That friction is a large part of why we built Alessia the way we did. Today you can store a completed assessment with the entry it evidences, tagged and linked to the competencies it supports and the goals you are building towards, so the paperwork stops being loose sheets in a separate system. We are building towards taking more of the paperwork out of it: an assessment sent to a supervisor for sign-off, and beyond that a workflow where the supervisor is invited into the assessment and completes it in the app, choosing from common formats for each assessment type and adapting them to what their hospital needs. Those later steps are on our roadmap rather than in the product today. The direction we are building towards is a workplace-based assessment that takes far less chasing and far less paperwork, so more of your effort goes into the clinical work and less into proving you did it.
The cost of leaving it too late
Whether it's down to bad planning or supervisors you can't pin down, the evidence that late assessments are worse is well documented.
A 2023 evaluation of the anaesthetics A-CEX found workplace-based assessments slipping into a tick-box exercise that does not guarantee any learning has taken place. A 2025 study of UK GP trainees who received a developmental outcome at their ARCP found support arriving too late in the year to change it. A decade earlier the same pattern was already on record: in 2011 Bindal and colleagues found almost half of assessments completed after the event rather than during it, and a 2016 analysis found almost a third of forms scored identically across every domain. Ten years and several curricula apart, the finding holds. Even on the forums, doctors call it what it is:
"Unfortunately a huge amount of medical training in the UK has been reduced to box ticking."
— u/Gullible__Fool, r/doctorsUK, June 2025
The lived cost is sharper still. One GP trainee, told their ARCP had been brought forward with their portfolio still "half empty", described what came next:
"I will be doing portfolio every waking moment of my next 2 weeks to try and catch up."
— u/adamdoc93, r/doctorsUK, 2025
The advice underneath it, from someone who had been through it, was simple:
"the portfolio is a nightmare but try and do it as you go along moving forward - makes life easier"
— u/Eyad2020a, r/doctorsUK, 2025
Five points to carry through the year
Whatever your specialty and whatever your training year, five points hold:
- The mix matters more than the number. A spread of assessment types shows a review more than the same one repeated.
- Match each assessment to the moment it suits, and arrange it while the case is still fresh.
- Start your multi source feedback early, before the colleagues who know your work move on.
- Look each month at which capability still has no evidence behind it, and book against a real upcoming case rather than the weeks before your annual review.
- Capture on the day. The form keeps, but the detail that made the case worth assessing does not.
None of this is heroic. It is a handful of small habits, kept up through the year, that turn the portfolio from a deadline you dread into a record that builds itself as you work. Start with the next assessment in front of you, and let the rest follow.
Sources
- UK Foundation Programme, Supervised learning events
- UK Foundation Programme, Team assessment of behaviour: guide for educational supervisors (2022)
- Royal College of Physicians / JRCPTB Federation, Workplace based assessments and mini-CEX guidance
- Royal College of Anaesthetists, Supervised Learning Events (SLEs), 2021 curriculum assessment guidance
- Royal College of General Practitioners, Workplace Based Assessment
- ISCP (surgical curriculum, JCST), Multi-Source Feedback (MSF) timing guidance
- General Medical Council, Generic professional capabilities framework
- Bamber H. Evaluation of the Workplace-Based Assessment Anaesthesia-Clinical Evaluation Exercise (A-CEX). Cureus, 2023;15(4):e37402
- Experiences of UK general practice trainees undertaking workplace-based assessment who received a developmental outcome at their ARCP. Education for Primary Care, 2025
- Bindal T, Wall D, Goodyear HM. Trainee doctors' views on workplace-based assessments. Medical Teacher, 2011
- Gilberthorpe T, Sarfo MD, Lawrence-Smith G. Ticking the boxes: a survey of workplace-based assessments. BJPsych Bulletin, 2016
- r/doctorsUK, thread on chasing seniors to complete assessments (July 2026)
- r/doctorsUK, "Useless ARCP feedback" (June 2025)
- r/doctorsUK, "ARCP date too soon, what do I do" (2025)
