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Features: Patients and colleagues as part of the process

29 March 2010

Patients will be a crucial part of revalidation

One of the most important ways in which doctors can understand the impact of their practice is by gathering feedback from both patients and colleagues. This will also help build public confidence in the revalidation process.

An important part of the supporting information doctors will need to collect to demonstrate that they meet the standards for revalidation will be feedback from colleagues and patients. The feedback will usually be gathered by asking colleagues and patients to complete questionnaires on the doctor’s practice and performance. This feedback is sometimes known as 360-degree or multi-source feedback (MSF).

Many doctors already use such methods to obtain feedback from patients and colleagues. For revalidation, the feedback will be fed into the appraisal process. Further information on how patient and colleague questionnaires might be used is provided in section 3 of the consultation.

The feedback from patients and colleagues will be organised through the doctor’s workplace, usually by independent organisations. We do not envisage that doctors will need to submit completed questionnaires every year. Our current view is that every doctor should have gathered independent feedback from patients and colleagues at least once every five years.

It is important that this process is robust and independently administered. We are currently developing colleague and patient questionnaires for use in the revalidation process.

Early research by Peninsula Medical School into the validity, reliability and practicality of these questionnaires has been encouraging. The results of a pilot study were published in June 2008 and are available online in the Quality and Safety in Health Care Journal. We have now commissioned more in-depth testing across whole organisations and in different clinical settings.

This independent research suggests that these patient and colleague questionnaires do have the potential to be a reliable means of collecting information about doctors’ performance.

You can view further information on this research on the Revalidation - Colleague and Patient Feedback page.