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During 2024, almost 7.4 million unique actions were completed within it, while the LLP support team closed 17,000 emails, ensuring that customer service remains our top priority. The LLP serves more than 25,000 users, with many of these being anaesthetists in training.

The LLP team has been busy delivering a range of webinars and workshops as part of our commitment to helping and supporting doctors on their individual and collective training paths. One important webinar was a pre-ARCP preparation workshop held in January 2025, with trainers and trainees contributing useful guidance, information and top-tips to navigate the process. This supplemented previous introductory guidance covering reviewing the curriculum and creating ESSRs, HALOs and SLEs.

Every year, anaesthetists in training (AiTs) undergo an Annual Review of Competency Progression (ARCP). ARCPs are a legal requirement and ensure that doctors are providing safe and high-quality patient care. They are used to assess progression against curriculum standards and provide evidence for General Medical Council (GMC) revalidation that happens every five years.

For AiTs, the ARCP panel reviews evidence submitted as part of the Educational Supervisors Structured Report (ESSR) on the Lifelong Learning Platform (LLP). The ESSR contains 16 sections and is the only thing visible to the ARCP panel, so it needs to be complete with all information required to ‘pass’ the ARCP!

Fortunately, the College has produced an in-depth checklist that outlines the requirements for a successful ARCP. This document clearly states what is required in each of the 16 sections for an Outcome 1 at ARCP. The ESSR itself must be created on the LLP after submission of all the prerequisite forms for all forms to pull through.

The Lifelong Learning Platform (LLP) continues to experience very high levels of use, with each month typically seeing more than 500,000 unique actions taking place among its user-base – which is approaching 24,500 – and the LLP team usually receives around 800 emails per month. This article introduces the team and also some of the wider support and governance around the LLP.

The LLP team is headed by Esma Doganguzel, Product Manager, and she is supported by Avia Spiers and Tunde Arowojolu, Product Owners, and Chris Kennedy, Revalidation and CPD Co-ordinator. The team blends strategic oversight, development, training, and regulatory expertise, and is committed to supporting and addressing the evolving needs of our users and to improving the LLP in innovative and progressive ways.

Maintaining and improving the LLP

Since its launch in August 2018, the College has committed to improving the reliability, performance and general user experience of the Lifelong Learning Platform (LLP) for our members. With the inclusion of three new curricula and of ICM users in late 2021, it became apparent that the added level of complexity and the need to support more users required additional funding, so a sizeable new budget was approved by the College’s Finance and Resources Board in August 2022.

This additional funding has allowed us to resolve many historic issues, keep the infrastructure and related systems up to date, as well as making significant improvements where needed. We still have a great deal of work to do, but as you will see below, we have already achieved a lot over the last year and have a clear plan of where we are heading in the coming months.

We continue to welcome applications for CPD accreditation of courses and events, and those that are approved are featured in the Lifelong Learning Platform (LLP) and on our website.

During 2023 we have received more than 950 applications for CPD accreditation. The numbers received by month were typically between 70–80 applications, but the months of March and September were particularly busy with 112 and 92 respectively received. This is an increase by more than 50 when compared against the same reporting period from last year.

Dr Claire Shannon, President outlines what's coming up in 2025 and why it's important to support each other and work as part of a great team.

Happy New Year to you all. I know many of you will have been working over the festive period, but I hope you also had some time to catch up with friends and family and take a well-earned break. 

Winter is never an easy time in the NHS. During the more challenging times of the year, I’m always particularly grateful for the support of my colleagues and the benefits of working as part of a great team. I hope that’s true for you too as we look to the year ahead.  

We have recently been adding some important updates to the Revalidation section of the College website, and we would like to draw your attention to these.

The first update focuses on appraisal: a key component of revalidation is the annual appraisal during which doctors will discuss their supporting information to demonstrate that they are continuing to meet the principles and values set out in Good Medical Practice.¹