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GP trainees struck by ‘nightmare’ website failures

By Ian Quinn

The training of thousands of would-be GPs has been plunged into chaos, after repeated problems with the RCGP 's trainee website resulted in lost work and delays in completing their assessments online.

The college's Trainee ePortfolio has been plagued by problems since last autumn but a failed bid to rebuild the site has left trainees facing major delays and frustration with many approaching the deadline to complete online training credits before they finish their training next month.

The RCGP said despite the work, problems with the site were still ongoing, with trainees repeatedly facing the site crashing and having to redo work towards their CCT (certificate of completion of training).

The college, which describes the ePortfolio as the 'glue' which holds the curriculum learning and assessment of trainees together, issued a statement to trainees and trainers saying: ‘You will be aware of the continuing problems with unexpected outages which have been affecting it since autumn last year. We share your frustrations.'

It said work has been carried out in early January in a bid to get the system to reboot within ten minutes of a crash but last week new technical issues emerged which have caused much greater delays.

Dr Una Coales, a GP in Stockwell, said ‘At a time when thousands of trainees nationally have to do their half year assessments or their end of year if they finish in February, it's imperative that they fix the problem.

‘Trainees and trainers have been dealing with an IT nightmare.'

The College said it expect the work to be completed by the end of February/early March, with a ‘go live' date for the new server set for March 14.

RCGP: training site plagued by IT problems RCGP: training site plagued by IT problems