I spent a little while carrying on updating my specialist portfolio website today.
Hopefully the trainees will find it of some use.
This is (supposed to be) a reflective diary by a (not very) anonymous biomedical scientist who works somewhere in the south of England. One day this diary may well be submitted to the Health and Care Professions Council as evidence of ongoing continual professional development....
Showing posts with label specialist website. Show all posts
Showing posts with label specialist website. Show all posts
25 September 2025 (Thursday) - More Specialist Portfolio Website
I spent a little while carrying on updating my specialist portfolio website today.
Hopefully the trainees will find it of some use.
23 September 2025 (Tuesday) - Specialist Portfolio Revisited
I’ve been asked to help with the
trainees.
If I’m going to do this, I want to do it
properly and with some sort of structure.
In the past I would sit with the trainee
and assign them a portfolio module to get on with.
A month later we sit together again,
review progress and either make a plan to address any shortcomings or move on
to the next module.
And so we continue with each trainee
getting a formal meeting once a month (as well as any help or assistance as
they need it).
The idea was that they would pretty much
get on with it themselves, To help them along we would give them the portfolio
together with presentations and links to useful websites in the form of a
website.
The old website I made to do this was
well out of date, so I thought I might bring it in line with the latest IBMS
portfolio.
http://mankybadger.co.uk/test/index.htm
is still very much a work in progress, but (if nothing else) re-building
this will be CPD for me.
19 October 2015 (Monday) - http://www.haemspecialistportfolio.co.uk/
By
popular demand I’ve resurrected http://www.haemspecialistportfolio.co.uk/
(it really is by popular demand – you’d
be surprised how many people have asked for it).
Mind
you at the moment it is a straight re-publish of what I had from four years
ago. I need to seriously review it. I shall do so over the next few weeks and
months….
18 October 2011 (Tuesday) - Specialist Portfolio
I received an email today with regard to the website of advice I’ve
compiled for students of the IBMS specialist portfolio in haematology:
|
From: Nice,
Lady (PLYMOUTH HOSPITALS NHS TRUST - RK9)
Sent: 18 October 2011 07:49 To: Author Website (SOMEWHERE IN ENGLAND NHS FOUNDATION TRUST) Subject: Specialist Portfolio.
Dear David,
I came across your website for
the Specialist portfolio recently. I am currently completing the
Specialist Portfolio in Cellular Pathology and I really wish we had a similar
website for our discipline! I was emailing to ask if you would mind if
I used some of your questions from the generic sections in my portfolio?
Many thanks!
Nice Lady
|
It’s good to see that the website
is attracting the sort of attention it needs to attract. If only I could get
some questions and presentations and the like for the various non-haematology
disciplines, I could put together some other websites for the other
disciplines.
After all, I’ve been asking
people for input for long enough…
Mind you, I’ve not done much work
on that website for a while. I understand the requirements have changed
somewhat over the last few months. Still, hopefully I should be able to get to
a training day on the subject in a month or so, and I can amend the website
when I can speak with some authority on the matter. (rather than guessing which I am at the moment)
Interestingly the nice lady
emailed me on my NHS mail account. I wonder how on Earth she found that – it’s
an account I don’t think I’ve ever used, and which I log into about once a
month at most.
19 June 2011 (Sunday) - Redirection
The web addresses of my two websites of advice aren’t the easiest of domain names to remember. Perhaps these will be easier:
April 17, 2011 (Sunday) - ESR & GF
I’m intending to give a couple of talks to the specialist portfolio students this week. The schedule calls for talks on the ESR and on glandular fever. So I spent a few minutes (an hour) on the on-line material for the relevant sections (7.1b & 7.1d): reviewing and slightly amending the set questions, and reorganising the PowerPoint presentations.
There are probably (hopefully!) some students who’ve already done the set questions as they were written before today’s revisions. That’s fine: the websites of advice are designed to be evolving things.
If only I could spend as much time actually hands-on with the students in the workplace as I do working on the on-line advice I prepare for them!
March 15, 2011 (Tuesday) - Specialist Portfolio
I spent a few minutes reviewing the specialist website. Specifically the advice on how to prepare the portfolio. I came up with:
| How to produce a portfolio is very much a matter of personal choice, but students would be best advised to take a portfolio subject area and complete all related questions and associated work before moving to the next area. Having said that students are reminded that a lot of the work which appears in section 7.1 is again duplicated in the subsequent sections. The following is as good a way as any to attack the haematology sections.
Perhaps recommending spending a month on each section is somewhat ambitious. Six weeks or two months may be more realistic. Students should also bear in mind that they need to perform section 6 work too, and as much of the optional blood transfusion section as they feel appropriate. Notwithstanding the above schedule, students are advised to keep their eyes open for anything which may lend itself to be written up as a case study, specifically:
|
Which is all very well as far as the haematology goes. The blood bank sections are still incredibly weak, as are the more general Section 6 sections.
I really need to be addressing those – I now have nine students who are (or soon will be) tackling the specialist portfolio…
March 14, 2011 (Monday) - Websites of Advice
I spent a few minutes tweaking the pre-reg website this morning. I’ve added a couple of supervisor’s affidavit templates. One to affirm competence in workload management & interpersonal skills, and another to generally affirm competence.
I suppose I might go on to add several more of these, but I can’t help but wonder if just one general affidavit might be better than having several more specific ones. But having more stuff from supervisors makes for more evidence in the portfolio, which is usually what the verifier wants to see.
I also had a look at the specialist website as well. It struck me that the advice on how to actually produce the portfolio might be better off being at the top of the navigation bar, rather than at the bottom.
One of my loyal readers has offered to “help with the presentation of the websites”. I’ve given this offer careful thought, but at the risk of appearing ungrateful, I’m going to turn the offer down. The idea of my websites of advice is that they are exactly that – websites of advice. So many websites have flashing lights and Java applets and so many bells and whistles that one can easily lose sight of the object of the exercise. Which is something I’m not keen to do.
November 15 2010 (Monday) - Specialist Portfolio Questions
A week ago I mentioned that I needed to re-write the questions I’ve set on my website of advice for students tacking the IBMS specialist portfolio. Today I re-vamped questions for sections 7.1a, 7.1b and 7.1c.
Three sections took half an hour. Doing all forty is going to take a while…
November 5 2010 (Friday) - The Specialist Portfolio
Over the last few weeks I’ve had success with students having pre registration portfolios passing assessment. However I’m painfully aware that I’ve been concentrating on pre-registration portfolio students at the expense of specialist portfolio students and my foundation degree student. Today I spent some time with my specialist portfolio students.
About eighteen months ago my plan was that I would give them a website to work from, so they wouldn’t need so much regular input from me. And since that time I have periodically worked on that website, including a major face-lift and re-vamp a month or so ago.
This idea has had some limited success. Whilst the students have access to questions and information, in retrospect I've not been fair to them by leaving them to get on with it. They do need input from a supervisor/mentor/me(!). Probably not much input, but more than I've been giving them.
Also on re-reading what I’ve put on that website, I’m not entirely happy with the questions I’ve set. When I wrote them I did so with the required competences in mind. However from my experiences of pre-registration portfolio examinations (in which assessors can’t see what I thought was painfully obvious(!)) I shall revisit my set questions for each section and make them more in line with the required competences.
Also on re-reading what I’ve put on that website, I’m not entirely happy with the questions I’ve set. When I wrote them I did so with the required competences in mind. However from my experiences of pre-registration portfolio examinations (in which assessors can’t see what I thought was painfully obvious(!)) I shall revisit my set questions for each section and make them more in line with the required competences.
However, bearing in mind this is over forty sets of questions to re-write, this may take some time….
October 14 2010 (Thursday) - I.T. Projects
To the right hand side of this page is a section which reads “THE AUTHOR'S OTHER CPD PROJECTS”…
I’ve doubled the size of the CPD presentation archive. There’s still not a lot there, but it will grow with time.
Following on from what I shall take as a glowing endorsement of my website of advice for students tacking the pre-registration portfolio on Tuesday, I’ve carried on updating the set questions which can be used as evidence for Section 1.
I have also utterly revamped my website of advice for students tacking the specialist portfolio in haematology and blood transfusion and relocated it to its new home.
I shall leave the original where it was, and all future efforts will go on this new-improved Mark II version. It still needs a lot of work; especially in the areas of blood transfusion. I expect I shall get round to those bits eventually. Blood transfusion isn’t exactly my forte….
September 30th (Thursday) - Iron Deficiency
A textbook case of iron deficiency. Clearly three years ago the patient was haematologically normal.
FIENDISH,GRIMLEY DOB Address PLANET EARTH Clinician CRIPPEN Date 30/09/2010 29/08/2010 13/05/2010 06/11/2008 28/10/2008 12/01/2007 Time u/k 10:25 07:06 u/k 10:03 11:16 Spec AM918276P AW184950Q AW289967S AM842670E AM830095R AM777490D Test HB 9.0 9.4 11.6 16.2 16.0 16.5 WBC 5.2 5.4 7.9 7.2 5.7 6.3 PLT 413 326 278 194 192 157 RBC 4.68 4.59 4.40 5.15 5.13 5.24 HCT 0.343 0.340 0.380 0.463 0.465 0.481 MCV 73.3 74.1 86.6 89.9 90.6 91.6 MCH 20.9 20.5 26.4 31.5 31.2 31.5 MCHC 28.6 27.6 30.4 35.0 34.4 34.4 NEUH 2.5 2.8 4.4 3.5 2.7 3.6 LYMPH 1.9 1.7 2.4 2.7 2.3 2.1 MONO 0.6 0.7 0.9 0.7 0.6 0.5 EOS 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 0.1 1 View 2 Graph 3 eXit X Cursor Down for more |
In the intervening three years the chap has obviously “sprung a leak” somewhere and his haemoglobin level has slowly fallen as the platelet count has risen. And as is expected the haemoglobin fell before the red cell volume did (see result of 13 May 2010 ). The blood film shows the characteristic hypochromia and microcytosis as well as pencil cells.
In the first instance a course of ferrous sulphate would deal with the symptoms, but clinical investigation to find the leak would be a sensible course of action.
And such reflection isn’t really fooling anyone: I’ve been doing this job for years. It’s not really news to me at all. But what is good about it is that it illustrates all the features of a chronic blood loss which causes an iron-deficiency anaemia. Such so-called “textbook” cases aren’t actually that common. Most get picked up by the patients presenting much earlier and long before the changes evident here have set in.
I’ve been looking for various case studies for the website of advice I’m compiling for people doing the specialist portfolio. This will do nicely. Mind you, I really need to revisit that website and do something with it. I haven’t touched it in ages…
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