The Irish College of General Practitioners’ (ICGP’s) trainee ePortfolio platform has gone live to almost 2000 users.

The platform, called GPEP, has been designed to act as a consolidated source of information for both trainers and trainees.

It is built on the Risr ePortfolio technology used by a number of medical colleges and universities around the world for rigorous academic training and assessment.

The launch of GPEP is the culmination of 18 months of work led by the ICGP’s academic programme manager Lisa Donaldson.

Ms Donaldson said the project started in October 2022 with the formation of a working group of approximately 18-20 diverse stakeholders, including the trainee voice.

“We ascertained requirements and this formed the basis of a public tender in summer 2023,” she told Pulse+IT. “Following evaluation, the top two candidates were invited to present to the working group and a final decision was taken to award the tender to Risr.

“As the project lead, I then mapped out the processes, activities, and documentation involved in the trainee learning journey over the four-year training programme. These were then designed as online workflows in the ePortfolio – for example the completion of evaluations at the conclusion of each rotation and the recording of entrustable professional activities.”

All core elements of the GP specialist training journey are now recorded in the ePortfolio, with individual dashboards for trainees, trainers, and directors of the training schemes.

An API has been incorporated to enable online learning resources completed in the Moodle virtual learning environment to be automatically transferred to the ePortfolio.

All paper has now been removed from GP training activities and has been replaced by online, digital workflows.

“Feedback to date has been that it’s a really positive move for all involved with GP training,” Ms Donaldson said.