Provide orientation and initial supervision
When a registrar commences the FSP they will be required to participate in the Early Assessment of Safety and Learning (EASL) activity over the first two weeks. The EASL involves a multi-choice questionnaire, self-assessment of confidence, workplace-based assessment, and orientation and initial supervision activities with the supervisor. The supervisor is expected to commit one hour per day for the first two weeks (total 10 hours) to conduct these activities. This supervision time will be remunerated.
The first activity is orientation. A well-planned, comprehensive orientation to the practice and the local environment is an essential task for the supervisory team to undertake together with the practice manager and other practice staff.
This recommended orientation checklist will guide your orientation activities.
Registrars start training with varying levels of experience and clinical competency. Until you’re aware of your registrar’s abilities and are confident that they will call for help when they should, it is likely that all their consultations will need review. If your registrar has already been working in the practice, you may already be aware of their competency level. Early assessment of competency may be achieved by:
- sitting in and observing their consultations
- attending or having a phone call at the end of each consultation
- scheduling time to discuss all consultations at the end of the session or day.
Once you are confident that routine review of all consultations is no longer necessary, give your registrar some guidance about when they are expected to call for supervision. To help inform this discussion, your registrar will have received the ‘call for help’ list – a list of clinical problems that past registrars and supervisors have considered warrant a call for help. Your registrar has also been asked to complete a self-assessment of their confidence to manage these clinical problems. This self-assessment, combined with any other available assessments and your knowledge of your registrar’s previous experience should inform a conversation about when they should call for help. The answer to the question ‘When should the registrar call for help?’ is one of the three questions to be answered to create your registrar’s supervision plan.