So you’ve done your initial 2 day appraiser training course to become RST compliant and you are gaining experience in conducting appraisals. Now you want to advance your skills and keep your knowledge up to date. How can you do it?

Once you have gained some experience you can move onto experienced appraiser top up training. This will give you information on any updates since you did your new appraiser training as well as refreshing your skills, It also includes a session on dealing with difficult appraisals- such as how do you handle doctors who have not fully engaged in the process

As an experienced appraiser there are a number of advanced skills workshops you can attend. The first of these is our MSF feedback workshop. This looks at how to interpret colleague and patient feedback in detail and how to feedback and discuss the results with your appraisee.

Another of these workshops is Handling Performance Concerns. This helps you to recognise and address issues associated with a struggling doctor and in particular how to have that difficult conversation. It will help you understand the dilemmas faced when dealing with doctors in difficulty and the frameworks and tools you have to work with.

Finally once you are an experienced appraiser you might want to think about training and coaching others to be an appraiser. To do this you will need to attend a train the trainer course where you will learn all the skills and knowledge to train others.

by Suzannah Varma