What to record in a logbook for ARCP.

Where the logbook sits in the ARCP paperwork

The RCEM ARCP requirement guides set out, row by row, the evidence a trainee must provide. The logbook is not one of those rows. Against practical procedures, both the intermediate and the higher guide give the evidence required as a “Faculty Educational Governance (FEG) statement; overall ESR”, with a direction to refer to the SLO6 practical procedure checklist.

What reaches the panel is a set of reports. The logbook sits underneath them, and the guides describe how it is used: “The final entrustment rating is made by the educational supervisor at the end of the training year after review of all the evidence provided by the specialty trainee for each SLO.”

A logbook is part of that evidence. It is read by the educational supervisor rather than submitted to the panel as a document in its own right, and it is worth building for the person who will actually read it.

Recording does not stop at sign-off

All three requirement guides, ACCS, intermediate and higher, carry the same paragraph:

“When a specialty trainee has been signed off as being able to perform a procedure independently, they are not required to have any further assessment (DOPS) of that procedure, unless they or their educational supervisor think that this is required (in line with standard professional conduct). This also applies to procedures that have been signed off during other training programmes. They would be expected to continue to record activity in their logbook.”

The assessments stop. The record does not. A trainee who logs only what is still awaiting sign-off ends up with the thinnest account of their practice in exactly the years where volume and range matter most.

What an entry needs to carry

The requirement guides do not prescribe logbook fields. They prescribe the judgement the entries have to support: an entrustment level for each procedure and for SLO6 as a whole, reached by a supervisor reviewing the year’s evidence.

Working back from that judgement, an entry that supports it records:

• The date. Progression is a claim about change over time and cannot be shown without it.
• The procedure or modality, named as the curriculum names it, so entries group against the checklist instead of having to be reconciled by hand.
• The supervision actually present. Not a rating of the trainee, but a description of the case: who was in the room, in the department, or at the end of a telephone.
• The context, where it changes the difficulty. Resuscitation room against cubicle, child against adult, time-critical against elective.
• For ultrasound, the findings. A scan log without them records that a probe was used rather than that a question was answered.

Supervision is the field most often left out, and the one the requirement guides lean on hardest.

Supervision is recorded, entrustment is awarded

A logbook should not offer the entrustment scale as a field for the trainee to fill in. Entrustment is awarded by an assessor on a workplace-based assessment, usually a DOPS. A self-assigned level carries no weight and blurs a distinction the assessment system depends on. The guide to the entrustment scale sets out the difference and where the thresholds fall.

Counts, and what they are actually for

For procedures, the requirement guides state entrustment levels rather than case numbers. The SLO6 tables give a minimum competency level expected for each procedure by the end of each training year. There is no column for how many.

A logbook that answers only “how many” therefore answers a question the requirement guides do not ask, while leaving unrecorded the one they do. Counts still matter, but as the raw material for a supervisor’s judgement rather than as a target in themselves.

Point-of-care ultrasound is the exception, in that indicative scan numbers do exist. They are qualified in every document that states them, and are covered in the guide to RCEM POCUS requirements.

What not to put in it

Nothing in the requirement guides asks for patient identifiers, and a logbook is not part of the clinical record. An entry needs enough for the trainee to recognise the case and for a supervisor to understand its difficulty. That does not require a name, a date of birth, or a hospital number.

Sources

• RCEM Training Standards, the page that carries the current requirement guides.
• ACCS ARCP Requirement Guide 2025-26, v1.1.
• Intermediate Training ARCP Requirement Guide 2025-26.
• Higher Training ARCP Requirement Guide 2025.

Quotations are reproduced for reference with attribution. Requirements change, and the requirement guides are reissued for each training year: check the current documents on the RCEM website before relying on anything here. LogEM is an independent app and is not affiliated with or endorsed by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine.