Foreword

Welcome to the October edition of your Deanery newsletter.

As Autumn is drawing in and the nights and mornings are getting darker it is even more important to ensure you get a break in the daylight regularly through the week. For those of you new to Scotland the trade off of the beautiful long summer days,  are cosy dark winter evenings! 

It was fantastic to hear the North Deanery were number one in the UK for FY1 as assessed by the GMC NTS, we are going to be looking for good practice to share across the whole of the country to ensure all Scotland’s regions are in the top 5! A huge thank you to all of the multidisciplinary teams who have worked hard to deliver this great result.

Staying in the North Region, we start our newsletter with three trainees and a lead trainer sharing their experiences of living and learning in Shetland, my favourite quote “the learning experience was really what made me not want to leave”  had to wrestle with the image of seeing seals on the beach on the way to Tesco ! Well done Dr Wilson and the team in the Gilbert Bain, NHS Shetland.

Thank you to Aoife Duignan (ST4 Geriatric Medicine) and Mathew Lyons (CT2 Anaesthetics) who have shared information on MeFB (Medical FeedBack, medicalfeedback.org) is a free, online tool that has been developed for health professionals to collect feedback after teaching. Since its launch in 2019, MeFB has become extremely popular with over 1200 users across the country, have a look it may help you evidence your teaching sessions.

We then highlight the Courses and Events section of the Deanery website which has details of upcoming events across all specialties which may well be of interest to readers. After this we look at a Health and Care Safety Investigators study which explores previous training, ongoing experiences and learning needs of staff who conduct investigations and learning reviews in Scotland’s health and social care systems. This study arrived at some clear recommendations - read the article to find out more.

Registrations are now open for the NES Bereavement Virtual Annual Conference which is on Thursday 24 November 2022. This is a  free one-day virtual event which will be opened by Professor Jason Leitch (National Clinical Director, Scottish Government) and promises to be an informative, thought provoking day.

The 2022 iMatter survey for Doctors and Dentists in Training and Clinical Fellows has now launched.  Depending on your Health Board, you’ll be asked to complete the survey at different times which are listed in the article. The information you feed in is used locally to improve the environments in which you all work.

Health Literacy Week occurs in October. To raise awareness of Health Literacy we are planning a webinar on Tuesday 25 October 2022 at 1:30 - 2:30pm. You can book a place on Turas Learn. You will need a Turas login to book. If you don’t have a Turas account you can register here. 

As part of you said we did to reduce the numbers of log ins required rom Tuesday 27th September 2022 NHS Scotland staff can sign-in to OpenAthens using their NHS Scotland work email address and password.

Please remember taking breaks is an essential part of your working day, if you are struggling to get breaks raise this with your team, your clinical or educational supervisor or one of the managers in your area.

Poll

Do you know if your workplace has a “speak up Guardian” ?

Please reply here: Speak Up Guardian Poll