The Age Of The Logbook
Since I qualified as a doctor in 2004, postgraduate medical education has undergone exhausting serial revolution. Every couple of years, a new grand plan has been formed and implemented, and a new clean sweep attempted, with mostly disastrous results. Those of us who've worked through this turbulent period have seen our training records dismissed as irrelevant not just once, but many times.
The only certainty, to my mind, is that the revolution isn't over yet, and the chaos is set to continue. Medical trainees will continue to be on the receiving end of a toxic mixture of political interference, capriciously changing educational theory and lack of care for the consequences of perpetual reform.
It is virtually guaranteed that today’s “gold standard” training practices will be discredited tomorrow.
Faced with perpetual requests to meet “new” standards (which are, in reality, the same as the old ones, but written on a new colour of paper and requiring a different set of corroborating signatures) medical trainees have only one effective weapon: a viable and complete record of the work we have done. No matter how many new hoops are devised for us to jump through, no-one can argue with your competence to do a job if you have records showing that you are already doing it competently.
In an age where you can be told that the exam you sat last year counts for nothing, your record of what you actually do at work has never been so important.
We made Logitbox so you could easily organise and securely record your clinical training records. Check it out now at logitbox.com.
