Every licensed UK doctor must undergo annual appraisal and five-yearly revalidation with the GMC. Understanding the requirements — and having a system to meet them with minimal administrative burden — prevents the annual appraisal scramble.
What You Need for Appraisal
Annual appraisal covers: CPD evidence (what you have learned and how it changed your practice), quality improvement activity (audit, QIP, significant event analysis), colleague feedback (multi-source feedback), patient feedback (at least once per revalidation cycle), health and probity declarations, and a personal development plan for the coming year.
Revalidation
Every five years, the GMC confirms your licence to practise based on cumulative evidence from annual appraisals. Your Responsible Officer reviews your five years of appraisal evidence and recommends revalidation (or identifies concerns). The five-yearly cycle means evidence must be accumulated steadily — not generated in the weeks before a revalidation date.
CPD Requirements
RCGP recommends minimum 50 CPD credits per year for GPs. Other Royal Colleges have similar recommendations. CPD must include a mix of personal learning (courses, reading, conferences, online modules) and practice-based learning (audit, QIP, case reviews, peer discussion). Every CPD activity must be documented with a reflection describing what you learned and how it changed your practice.
How iatroX CPD Tracking Works
iatroX's CPD module automatically logs learning from Ask iatroX clinical queries and adaptive quiz sessions. Each clinical question you explore or quiz session you complete generates a potential CPD entry. AI-assisted reflections help you document what you learned and how it applies to practice. One-click CPD reports mapped to professional domains provide ready-made appraisal evidence.
The "little and often" approach: every clinical question you explore on iatroX is a CPD opportunity. Rather than generating CPD evidence as a separate administrative task, it emerges naturally from your daily clinical support and learning activities.
Comparison with Other Tools
FourteenFish: the established GP appraisal platform, strong for portfolio management and appraisal submission. iatroX: integrates CPD tracking with clinical Q&A and adaptive learning — CPD evidence generated as a byproduct of clinical work, not as a separate administrative task. Both have a role — FourteenFish for the formal appraisal submission, iatroX for generating the evidence that populates it.