What are learning notes?

Learning notes are an easy and quick way to record your Continuing professional development (CPD) for your appraisal and revalidation.

How do I record them?

You can record learning notes on the website as Supporting Information, by using the Learning Diary App or by emailing learning@fourteenfish.com

This only works if you email from the email address you are registered with. You can set multiple email addresses in My Account. For more information on this please see the help page.

If you record your learning via email, the subject will be used as the title of your learning.

The email itself will be copied as the notes for the entry and you can later summarise the learning, reflect what you learnt and record the amount of credits.

How many credits should I score?

It is essentially 1 credit for every hour of learning. You can score yourself 0.5 credits if you only spent half an hour of learning.

The aim is to demonstrate impact. This means describing how it will change your practice or describing how you taught others what you learnt.

The learning notes have a space where you can record why you have awarded the amount of credits you have.

This is a guide only and the final amount will have to be agreed with your appraiser.

How do I use this in my Appraisal?

If you are using our Portfolio, all of the entries in your Supporting Information can be automatically included in your current appraisal. 

If you are using another toolkit you can export a summary to a PDF from the My Learning Page. Make sure the date in the Credits date box is the date you want the summary to start from.

Tags

Tags have been introduced as a way of categorising your supporting information for an appraisal and learning notes in the Learning Diary.

This helps to demonstrate learning across different areas as well as helping you to quickly find all learning notes that have a particular tag.

Roles

We have introduced Roles as a way of being able to categorise your learning to your different areas or scope of work.

For example you might set a Role as GP for your GP work and another as Teacher for your role as a teacher of medical students.

You can then add further tags such as Clinical and Managerial, and these can be attached to a Role.

This is to help you demonstrate your learning across your different roles or scope of work.

Why have you changed Supporting Information?

We have added the notes section as we had feedback that putting emailed in entries straight into learning meant that the learning was often very detailed.

This is why we have added the notes section for Supporting Information entries so they can still be used as a personal reference whilst also providing neat summaries for appraisers and Responsible Officers.