How do I organise my evidence?
We can deal with your application quicker if you make sure you only send us evidence that’s directly relevant. We would usually expect to see between 800 and 1000 pages of evidence.
Evidence over five years old will be given less weight than more recent evidence, so you may not need to include it.
Once you’ve submitted your application, you should send us your evidence within 14 days. We’ll let you know how to send your evidence electronically.
Your evidence should be structured so that we can assess it properly.
Your application dividers
It’s really important you download and print our divider pack to help you arrange and present your evidence correctly. You must follow the structure of these dividers when ordering your evidence.
Patient and colleague confidentiality
When submitting your evidence, you should remember your responsibilities under Good medical practice (GMP). Domain 4 of GMP is about maintaining trust.
What information do I need to anonymise?
- All patient identifying details
- Details of patients’ relatives
- Details of colleagues that you’ve assessed, written a reference for, or who have been involved in a complaint you’ve submitted.
This includes:
• Names (first and last)
• Addresses
• Contact details such as phone numbers or email addresses
• NHS numbers
• Other individual patient numbers, including hospital or unit numbers
• GMC numbers - The following details don’t need to be anonymised:
• Gender
• Date of birth
This information can be useful to the evaluators in assessing whether you’ve seen a range of patients.
How should I anonymise my evidence?
Hard copy evidence
When you remove this data you should be aware that certain ink may bleed through a marker pen when you scan your evidence. We suggest you use a crayon instead of a marker pen as this ensures information remains anonymised in your documents.
Electronic evidence
We recommend you use redaction software to anonymise your evidence – its vital that any redaction you apply electronically is permanent i.e. cannot be moved or amended by us when the evidence is submitted.
Redaction software can be found through the popular search engines, including tools that are free. When using redaction tools, please remember to take the appropriate steps to remove your sensitive files and/or data after use.
What happens if I fail to anonymise my evidence?
It’s your responsibility to make sure that your evidence has been anonymised. We accept no responsibility for checking that all of your evidence has been anonymised.
If we become aware of identifiable personal information whilst checking your evidence, we'll delete this from your application and asked you to resubmit it once it’s been fully redacted. The relevant Royal College or Faculty will be made aware that your original evidence included some personal data.
If you submit further evidence which hasn’t been anonymised correctly at the point we’re ready to send your application to the Royal College or Faculty for evaluation we’ll exclude these documents as stated above.
We won’t anonymise any data on your behalf.
If you don’t follow these requirements you may be in breach of the data protection legislation and the patient confidentiality standards in GMP. You may be referred to our Fitness to Practise Directorate.
