The VetGDP e-portfolio: a practical guide for advisers

Hi everyone. My name is Jenny Soreskog-turp and I'm the Lead for Postgraduate Education at the RCVS.

I'm going to show you how the VetGDP e-portfolio works from the VetGDP Advisers' perspective.

You log in at the same website where you log in for 1CPD. You use your My Account username and password, and then you'll get an option: you can either go to 1CPD or VetGDP.

We'll choose VetGDP. And all of our graduates have already completed the declarations and they've chosen their VetGDP Adviser. So, you can see that these are my graduates and I can then click on them to review what activities and progress they've made.

I will start with this one. And this is a new one, so he - this graduate - has just started the VetGDP and chosen the EPAs. Hopefully, that will have been something that the Adviser and graduate will have done together.

So now the VetGDP Adviser can just approve the EPA selection. So you'll see all the selected EPAs here. And then you can either approve the entire selection or you can request changes. If you want to request changes, you press the red button and then you can just add some comments that will just be sent to the graduate again and then they can amend their EPA selection. But hopefully, in most cases, you can just approve the entire EPA selection and the graduates will then be able to start recording their progress.

Okay, so I'll go back to the homepage and just choose one of my other graduates. So you can see what activities and progress they've made. And you'll see here on the left-hand side is all the EPAs that are part of their portfolio. And you'll see a description of the EPAs here. At the bottom of the page, you can see if they recorded any activities, reflection or progress review against the EPA.

For this one, they haven't yet recorded an activity. So there are no blue buttons at the bottom. If you click through, you can just see that.

If we go to EPA 1, you can either view activities, view reflection or view progress review. If you click 'View activities', there'll be a list of any activities that they've recorded. So here I can see the basic details of the activity, if there are any attachments, and I can also view the reflections. And if I want to, I can add a comment or edit the comment here and that will then be part of the graduate's portfolio. And I can go back.

And if you go to 'Reflection', you'll see the same screen that you saw with 'Activities', but it will take you straight to just a reflection section there. And then you'll also see 'View progress review'. If you click on that one, you'll have a list of all the progress reviews that you've done against that EPA. So you just click on that one and you'll see first the summary page.

There are different ways to do the progress review: you might want to do them together with your graduate and just fill in all the information together; or the graduate might prepare some of the reflections and summary and then you can review it. But the graduates will do most of the recording. You'll see here they filled in the progress review - you can add a comment if you want.

And then you'll see on the next page are all the sliding scales that you should try to do together, so that you can have a discussion of where the graduates are at for this EPA. The VetGDP Adviser can't amend the sliding scales in their portfolio, so it's only the graduates who can do that.

So if we go back, there's quite a lot of text and I know that it can feel like this is going to take up quite a lot of work. But we will be introducing an app version of the portfolio later this year and you will then be able to use the audio recording button. But it's worth remembering that as most, part of most laptops and mobile devices, you can also use speech recognition software. So, if I do that, as part of my laptop, I'll just delete my comment and then - here are my comments. And insert that. So it just magically transforms that into text, which makes it very, very easy to just record all your conversations or reflections. And then you can just save it.

So that's basically how the VetGDP Adviser portfolio works. It's very straightforward. It just gives you access to everything that the graduate records. But remember that you can use the 'Contact us' button if there's anything that you feel you need more guidance, it's not working properly, just say: 'I have a suggestion' and send us your comments. We really appreciate all the feedback that we can get and any suggestions for further improvements. Thank you so much.

Hello. In the feedback, advisers asked us if they could add a progress review to a graduate portfolio as well as just the graduates. So we have added that facility for you now.

So the way to do this is you log into your VetGDP. So "support your graduate", and then you choose the particular graduate that you have that you want to talk about, and skip the questionnaire.

This is Grace's portfolio, and you want to add a progress review. So the list of EPAs, the different EPAs, is down the side, and you want to add a progress review for EPA 5.

Click on EPA 5 and click "add progress review". So progress reviews are records of conversations between a graduate and a VetGDP adviser on an individual EPA topic.

Either party can begin the progress review and both can edit it, but the graduate should take ownership of the review. So you can start it, but it will be down to the graduate to complete it.

Click on "add progress review". You can start a recording. These are up to five minutes. So, if you're sitting with a graduate, then you might want to record five minutes of the recording. Or you can type into the boxes.

So, we'll add a date of this review. You can backdate it if you want to, but we'll click on today's date. Then you can add in a summary of your discussion. Some VetGDP advisers like to sit down with their graduate and have a discussion while they're there, and they can put in bullet points of things that they've talked about for the graduate to go in and flesh out later.

Other vet advisers might want to start and do the summary of the discussion that they had, and then the graduate can add to that afterwards. The reflection can't be done by the VetGDP Adviser. So that's great. It must be added by the graduate because they are reflecting on what you've told them, and it is their reflections that are important.

The goals and action plans are very much to do with your graduate. You talk about the goals that have arisen from what you discussed and also, more importantly, set the action plan - how are they going to achieve those goals?

As you know, these sliders are basically a conversation starter. So you can discuss with your graduate. Often the graduate is less confident in their abilities than you are - or occasionally/sometimes more confident than they ought to be - and you can have that discussion and set those sliders where they need to go.

And then you would save, and the progress will be there. And this will also appear in Grace's. So, she'll be able to access it from her side, and she'll be able to make edits and additions.

You too will be able to go in and edit it afterwards. And there will still be the box there for you to add adviser comments afterwards, should you want to.

This is the box where you would add comment. The sorts of things you would do when you're adding comment is perhaps correct misconceptions or give further feedback or perhaps just congratulate the graduate.

And there: that's saved.