What's it like to revalidate?

Professor Sir Peter Rubin revalidated on 18 December, the first UK doctor to do so, after a positive recommendation from his responsible officer. We spoke to Sir Peter about his experiences.

You can watch the whole of the interview below, or you can read some key excerpts below.  

If you are registered with a licence to practise, you will receive a letter from us with the date of your first revalidation by the end of this month (January 2013).  

Based on plans developed by the four UK countries, we expect to revalidate:

• responsible officers and other medical leaders first, by March 2013
• about a fifth of licensed doctors between April 2013 and the end of March 2014
• the majority of licensed doctors by the end of March 2016
• all remaining licensed doctors by the end of March 2018.  

Excerpts from interview with Sir Peter

What have you learnt about yourself from collecting feedback?

I’ve been collecting feedback for some time now. I think the first is the most useful exercise because it’s the very first time you see yourself as others see you.  

I had this image of myself as a really approachable person and a really good communicator. And then I read the feedback.  

The people I worked very closely with agreed with me. But the rest of the medical school – around a thousand people – were saying, ‘Who is this guy? What does he do?’  

So clearly, I wasn’t as effective a communicator as I thought I was. And that was a really useful wake up call because the image of myself I had wasn’t entirely accurate.   

Do you worry about negative feedback?

Nobody’s perfect. Most of your feedback will be very positive and that’s important because we’re often not very good at saying well done. But there will be things where people suggest you could do something better.  

Collecting feedback needs to be approached with the spirit in which it’s intended – we know at the GMC that most doctors are really good, but there will always be things we can do to take it a step further.  

What’s it like being appraised across the whole of your practice?

I’m a clinical academic employed by a university with an honorary contract with the NHS. So for about ten years now my appraisal has involved three people in a room together – a university appraiser, an NHS appraiser and me.  

That’s become normal for me, though I realise it won’t be for a lot of doctors.  It’s really important [to do it that way] because there’s always a risk that each of your employers thinks that they own you 100%, so it’s good for them to hear what the different issues are.