Scotland Deanery Annual Quality Report 2021

Since last year’s Annual Quality Report, COVID-19 has continued to impact on service  
provision and training. The ongoing need to work differently has driven remarkable  
innovation and produced extraordinary collaboration between ourselves in the  
Scotland Deanery and our important stakeholders, both in Scotland and beyond. 
Showing great agility, our teams have worked collaboratively with Directors of Medical  
Education to tackle pressing issues and maintain active engagement with training  
sites, particularly where patient safety or trainee dignity at work issues were involved.  
New ways of working were deployed, and we summarise the outputs and outcomes of this  
work in a summary report for each specialty area. 

The COVID-19 Survey to evaluate the impact of COVID-19 on trainees is a striking example of agility and innovation. Looking at training, service, and the psychological impacts of COVID-19, we revealed that trainees across a range of different training programmes were impacted educationally, professionally, and psychologically. Important learning that we have used to better support the personal health and well-being of trainees together with their educational needs.

Alongside this, we remain fully committed to wider improvement and you can read about the work we have done to improve our data quality, our use of data, our processes and what has been done to train our internal team. These efforts have paid off and been recognised by our regulator, the General Medical Council (GMC), who concluded that the Scotland Deanery quality system was working well and meeting the necessary standards, particularly regarding the quality of our data inputs and the consistency of our decision making across specialties and Health Boards. Pleasingly the GMC made no recommendations for the Scotland Deanery: a welcome endorsement of our system and the fantastic work of our team.

A well-earned position from which we can further improve, recognising that there is always more to do. Demitting office early next year I am personally pleased to leave the Scotland Deanery quality system in good health and performing well. Decisions to invest in quality management and introduce a consistent, standardised approach across Scotland have proved to be of benefit. The correlation between poor training and poor patient care is self-evident and we all have a duty to raise standards in the former to make care better for patients, now and in the future.

We therefore reaffirm the Scotland Deanery’s commitment to ensuring that the GMC’s  
standards are being achieved in all training environments, benefitting the safety and  
effectiveness of patient care and we commend the 2021 Annual Quality Report to you as a  
summary of our efforts in this regard.

You can read the report here: Scotland Deanery Annual Quality Report 2021